On March 31, Nicole Starosielski, Professor of Film & Media at UC Berkeley, presented work at BIDS on undersea cables and digital infrastructure “Facilitating Sustainability: Cable Landing Stations and the Alternative History of Network Architectures”.
Starosielski has been doing research on the physical installations that support Internet traffic, including data centers, terrestrial fiber, optic cables, satellites, earth stations, microwave and cell towers, and so on. Starosielski is deeply involved with the SubOptic Association, a subsea cable industry organization, and runs its Global Citizen Working Group that launched a project called Sustainable Subsea Networks. Alongside this, Starosielski is working on a set of papers that are intended to set in place a scaffolding for the development of sustainability metrics in the subsea cable industry. Starting Summer 2025, Starosielski is leading the development of UC Berkeley’s Certificate in Global Digital Infrastructure, the first program to introduce students to the technical, economic, legal, environmental, and social dimensions of the global Internet’s infrastructure, including both data centers and subsea telecommunications cables.
The subsea cable industry includes approximately 1,300 cable landing stations (CLS) worldwide, which are physical facilities from which a subsea telecommunications cable is powered and where it may also terminate. The greatest number of stations are in the US and UK, and some of decommissioned stations have been preserved or the architecture has been repurposed.
Image: Clare et al., 2023
“I've been really interested in ways that not only buildings themselves, but their long histories, surrounding geographies, and crucially, the people that operate and maintain them and build them shape considerations of networking. And so I've done a lot of work with industry and with people in the industry to understand how their decision-making processes come to shape different network architectures.” -- Nicole Starosielski
In the talk, Starosielski described the CLS equipment and how it can shape the future possibilities of Internet sustainability: The power feed equipment (PFE), the transmission terminal equipment, and the network management equipment. Over the last 10 years, the transmission equipment has been moving out of the cable landing station into data centers which can sometimes be beneficial, because data centers are open, meaning they are accessible by more industry players instead of a single entity, and there is also sustainability work already in progress at data centers.
We also learned that CLSs are just one piece of our digital infrastructure, the integrated system that supports the transmission, storage and computation of data through cables and data centers, cell towers and satellites. As more industries, sectors and people depend on these systems, Starosielski asserts the need for basic literacy about what they are – “a recognition and a sort of holistic understanding of the infrastructural layer of the stack and its interrelated components”. To build and understand the systems, Starosielski highlights the need for collaborative work across scientific, social, and scientific domains, not limited to academia – a shared, core belief at BIDS. Governments around the world are working to understand what digital infrastructure is, what they need, and how it can be built and regulated.
Starosielski’s research on the deep and fascinating history of CLS helped illustrate a case for interdisciplinary analysis of network facilities.