Hidden structures of a global infrastructure: Expansion factors of the subsea data cable network

The network of subsea data cables (SDC) transmits the majority of international and intercontinental data exchanges. After thirty years of fiber-optic SDC installation across the oceans, almost all coastal and island countries gained access to the only global fixed infrastructure network. Still, there is considerable inequality in the number of available SDC accesses, creating deficits in redundancy for less connected states. Previous research hypothesized multiple factors that influenced the build-up of internet infrastructures but failed to verify these assumptions through inferential statistics. This work highlights the national-level factors that made backbone access provision more – or less – attractive to SDC project decision-makers. Our regression analysis of global country-year data (n = 4916) found that socio-economic (population, GDP), political (state fragility, conflict), and geographic factors (seismic hazard, neighboring territories) significantly influenced the number of active and planned accesses. This work can serve as a foundation for further research leveraging quantitative statistics to unveil hidden structures in the construction of material internet infrastructures and support sustainability in the future allocation of international infrastructure development resources in general.