[anttihaapala]

If you consider an underwater cable running from Finland to Germany or Sweden to Lithuania in the Baltic Sea, it is virtually impossible for a ship travelling from St. Petersburg to the Kattegat to avoid passing over it, so redundancy can do only that much there.

[diggan]

> If you consider an underwater cable running from Finland to Germany or Sweden

Well, if you only think about direct links, then yes. But run 5 cables up and down the coasts of Sweden<>Finland, then also for Sweden<>Germany, Denmark<>Sweden and Denmark<>Germany and you start having a lot of redundancy.

Of course, that also adds a lot of ongoing costs for infrastructure, monitoring and maintenance, so not a silver bullet exactly.

[logicchains]

Maybe a stupid question, but is it possible to run a power cable next to the internet cables, so any ship dragging its anchor over the cables gets a rude surprise? Or that wouldn't work underwater?

[Etheryte]

That wouldn't do anything, you'd just be sending it straight to ground.

[immibis]

"straight to ground" is not how electricity works, but yes, they'd probably just destroy the cable in that spot, and the anchor would have only a slight scar on it at most

[kortilla]

Undersea cables already have electric cables to power the embedded repeaters

[tzs]

A big problem with that in general is that there is an accidental cable cut from a ship about every 3 days on average. Deliberate cable cuts are rare.