Only ~60 cable repair ships exist globally, causing 5-month waits for submarine fiber fixes

The world's submarine cable network carries over 95% of intercontinental data traffic, yet there are only approximately 60 cable repair ships worldwide. When a cable is cut -- by anchors, fishing trawlers, earthquakes, or (increasingly) deliberate sabotage -- the repair ship must sail to the break location, grapple the cable from the ocean floor, splice it on deck, and re-lay it. So what? The AAE-1 cable cut in the Red Sea in February 2024 was not restored until late July -- nearly 5 months of degraded connectivity affecting millions of users across Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. The PEACE cable cut in March 2025 faced a similarly extended repair timeline. During these outages, traffic reroutes through surviving cables, which become congested, increasing latency by 50-200ms for affected regions. The problem persists because cable repair ships cost $100-200M each and require specialized crews, but cable owners (consortiums of telecom companies) under-invest in repair capacity because each individual company views the repair fleet as someone else's responsibility -- a classic tragedy of the commons.