I spend most of my time worrying about the last mile: the cable from the pole to your house, the splice that fails in the rain, the router on your wall. But every now and then something happens thousands of kilometres away that reminds me the internet I sell in Kashmir doesn't actually start in Kashmir. It starts in the ocean.
A March 2026 report put a number on it that I haven't been able to forget. Around 95% of India's international bandwidth comes ashore through about six kilometres of Mumbai coastline. Six kilometres. For a country of 969 million internet users, almost everything we do that touches a server outside India runs through one short stretch of beach.
What an undersea cable actually is
When people picture "the internet," they picture wifi, or maybe a data center full of blinking lights. The real backbone is duller and far more fragile than that. It's a few hundred fiber cables, most no thicker than a garden hose, lying on the seabed between continents. They carry almost all intercontinental traffic. Satellites, even the new constellations, handle a tiny fraction of it.
So when you open a site hosted in the US, stream something off a server in Singapore, or make a video call to someone in Dubai, your packets don't fly through the sky. They travel down a glass thread on the ocean floor. It's one of the most impressive things humans have built, and one of the most exposed.
What happens when one gets cut
In September 2025, multiple cuts hit two major systems, SMW4 and IMEWE, on the routes linking India to the Middle East and Europe. A lot of that traffic passes through the Red Sea, which has become one of the most dangerous stretches of water on earth for cables. Anchors, conflict, and plain bad luck all play a part.
Down at my level, a cut like that doesn't look dramatic. Nobody loses internet completely. What happens is subtler and more annoying: sites load slower, calls get choppy, latency to anything hosted abroad climbs, and a few apps start timing out for no reason a customer can see. The big operators, Tata, Airtel, Jio, reroute traffic onto whatever cables are still healthy, which works, but a longer path means a slower internet.
And here's the part that matters for someone like me. When a customer's connection feels worse that week, they don't blame a cable in the Red Sea they've never heard of. They blame the last name on the bill. They blame ViberNet. The failure happens 4,000 kilometres away and lands on my doorstep.
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India has no repair ship
The detail that genuinely surprised me: India does not own a single cable repair vessel. Not one. When a cable breaks, we have to wait for a foreign-operated ship to be free, get permits, find a weather window, locate the break, haul the cable up from the seabed, splice it, and lower it back. The same March report described monthly faults and a repair queue of three to five months.
Sit with that. A break in the thing that carries 95% of our international traffic can take months to fix, and we depend on someone else's boat to do it. For all the talk about India becoming a digital superpower, the most critical piece of the plumbing is something we can neither fully protect nor quickly repair on our own.
It's the same pattern I see at every scale of this business. Everyone obsesses over the shiny end, apps, speeds, 5G, AI. Almost nobody wants to fund or fix the boring, physical, unglamorous layer that the whole thing actually rests on. A repair ship isn't a press release. It's just the reason your internet comes back in a week instead of a quarter.
Why this matters from Kashmir
Kashmir is about as far from that Mumbai coastline as you can get in India, geographically and in every other way. We're the very last mile of the very last mile. By the time a packet reaches a home in Srinagar, it has already crossed an ocean, landed in Mumbai, ridden the national backbone north, and only then reached my fiber.
That long chain is exactly why I think local reliability is the whole game. I can't fix a cable in the Red Sea. I can't build India a repair fleet. But I can control my slice: clean splices, honest routing, backhaul that doesn't fall over, and being straight with customers when a problem is upstream of me instead of pretending it isn't. When the ocean has a bad week, the ISP that survives it is the one customers already trust on their street.
It also reframes how I think about resilience. Redundancy isn't paranoia, it's the job. More cable landing points, more diverse routes, terrestrial backups through other countries, eventually satellite as a genuine fallback rather than a gimmick. None of that is my decision to make at the national level, but all of it eventually shows up as whether my customer's call drops at 9 PM.
The internet is more physical than we admit
We talk about the internet like it's weather, everywhere, invisible, just there. It isn't. It's cables, ships, splices, and a few short stretches of coastline that almost everything depends on. The whole system is a stack of physical single points of failure, and most people will never know they exist until one of them breaks.
That's the thing I keep coming back to after years of laying cable. The internet feels infinite and abstract right up until it doesn't. Then you find out it was always a fragile, physical thing held together by people willing to do the unglamorous work, on a beach in Mumbai, on a ship in the Red Sea, or up a pole in Srinagar.
If you build infrastructure, or just want to compare notes on how fragile the stuff we rely on really is, I'd like to hear from you: me@mehranshahmiri.com
