Core & Backbone Networks

1844 · 182 years ago

Samuel Morse sent the first long-distance telegraph message in the United States

The Washington-to-Baltimore demonstration proved that electrical signals could carry information over long distances almost instantly, establishing the basic principle, rapid transmission over dedicated wired links, that all later core network infrastructure has built upon.

1866 · 160 years ago

The first permanent transatlantic telegraph cable entered service

After an 1858 attempt failed within weeks, a durable cable cut communication time between Europe and North America from roughly ten days by ship to minutes, the first time a message crossed an ocean electrically rather than physically.

1969 · 57 years ago

ARPANET carried the first host-to-host connection between two computers

A link between research computers at the University of California, Los Angeles and Stanford demonstrated packet-switched networking outside a laboratory, the technical ancestor of the core network architecture the modern internet still uses.

1986 · 40 years ago

SEA-ME-WE 1 linked South East Asia to the Middle East and Western Europe by cable

The first of what became a numbered series of consortium cables gave Singapore, India and Gulf states a shared backbone route to Europe, establishing a cooperative multi-country cable model the region kept using for later generations of the system.

1988 · 38 years ago

TAT-8 became the first fibre-optic cable to cross the Atlantic

Replacing copper cables that had carried a few thousand simultaneous calls, the fibre link could carry tens of thousands, beginning the replacement of the entire transoceanic cable network with fibre over the following decade.

1994 · 32 years ago

China made its first full connection to the global internet

A single link to the United States gave the country's research networks access to the wider internet, the starting point for infrastructure that later grew into the world's largest national internet population by user numbers.

• China's user base grew to become the world's largest

1994 · 32 years ago

The London Internet Exchange was founded by a small group of internet service providers

Set up so competing providers could exchange traffic directly rather than routing it through the United States, LINX became a model copied by exchange points across Europe, Asia and Africa seeking to keep local traffic local.

1995 · 31 years ago

The United States privatised NSFNET and established the first commercial Network Access Points

The transition moved the internet's core from a government-funded research network to commercially operated infrastructure, with the new access points serving as the model that internet exchange points worldwide later followed.

1996 · 30 years ago

Dense wavelength-division multiplexing was commercialised, multiplying the data capacity of existing fibre routes

By sending many separate colours of light down a single fibre strand simultaneously, the technology increased the capacity of existing cables many times over without the expense of laying new ones, underpinning the following decade's bandwidth growth.

1997 · 29 years ago

The FLAG cable system linked the United Kingdom to Japan via the Middle East and South Asia

At the time the longest single cable system in the world, it gave South Asian and Gulf markets a direct route into the global fibre backbone rather than relying on satellite links or short regional cables.

February 2025 · last year

Taiwanese authorities detained a Chinese-crewed vessel over a suspected cable-cutting incident near Taiwan

A cargo vessel was detained after an undersea cable connecting Taiwan to the outlying Penghu islands was severed, part of a pattern of anchor-drag incidents that Taiwanese officials increasingly treated as deliberate grey-zone pressure rather than accident.

January 2025 · last year

NATO launched the Baltic Sentry mission to protect undersea cables and pipelines

The mission added patrol ships, aircraft and undersea drones to Baltic Sea monitoring after a succession of cable and pipeline incidents involving vessels linked to Russia, treating seabed infrastructure protection as a standing military task rather than an occasional response.

• Sweden and Finland contributed vessels as new NATO members

2025 · last year

African internet exchange points carried a growing share of the continent's traffic locally

Exchanges in Nigeria, Kenya and other markets kept more domestic traffic from routing through Europe, cutting latency and cost for local users, part of a longer campaign by the African Union and Internet Society chapters to build local peering capacity.

• The African Union backed a target for local traffic exchange

December 2024 · 2 years ago

Finnish authorities seized the tanker Eagle S after an Estlink cable-cutting incident in the Baltic Sea

Investigators suspected the tanker, part of a shadow fleet linked to Russian oil exports, of dragging its anchor across a power cable and several telecommunications cables between Finland and Estonia, adding to a run of Baltic Sea infrastructure incidents.

2024–2025 · last year

The 2Africa consortium brought further segments of the round-Africa cable system into service

Additional landing stations came online across East and West Africa, extending what was already among the world's longest submarine cable systems and giving several coastal states extra international capacity beyond a single ageing cable.

2024–2025 · last year

US regulators continued blocking Chinese state carriers from new cables landing in the United States

Security reviews kept China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom off new trans-Pacific cable systems, pushing operators toward routes that avoided both Chinese landing points and Chinese-linked capacity, reinforcing a split between competing cable ecosystems.

2024–2025 · last year

Vietnam faced repeated simultaneous faults across its main international cables

Vietnam's international bandwidth relies on a small number of ageing cables including the Asia-Africa-Europe-1 and Asia-Pacific Gateway systems, and simultaneous faults on several of them again slowed domestic internet access, adding urgency to investment in newer routes.

2024–2025 · last year

Pacific island states gained new submarine cables funded by the United States, Australia and Japan

New cables connecting Palau, Nauru and other Pacific nations were funded largely by traditional partners after some governments rejected Chinese state-linked bidders, part of a wider contest over who builds, and can potentially access, the region's digital infrastructure.

2024–2025 · last year

Google advanced construction of the Umoja cable, the first direct fibre route linking Africa to Australia

The cable, running overland from Kenya before continuing under the Indian Ocean, formed part of Google's wider investment in diversifying African connectivity beyond older routes running through Egypt and continental Europe.

2024–2025 · last year

Red Sea cable operators struggled to repair cables damaged amid Houthi attacks on shipping

Several cables carrying a significant share of traffic between Europe and Asia were damaged in the Red Sea corridor, and repair vessels faced delays reaching the area because of the security situation, prompting operators to reroute traffic and explore overland alternatives.

• Google and other operators explored overland routes bypassing the Red Sea