Infrastructure's Importance Often Lies Beneath the Surface

October 27, 2026

By: Maryam Zehtabchi

October 27, 2026 ・ minutes reading time

Glowing blue lines connect continents across oceans on a digital Earth globe, representing submarine communication cables — Image: imaginima/E+/Getty Images

Digital technologies can transform economies and lives, but only if they reach people. Discover why undersea cables can act as gatekeepers of digital technology diffusion.

A world connected, but unevenly

Digital technologies hold real potential to drive economic growth and social development, but only if people can actually access and use them. Understanding what drives or blocks that spread, and who it affects most, matters for individuals, businesses and policymakers alike. Barriers take many forms, from infrastructure gaps and digital skills shortages to affordability constraints, regulatory hurdles and market structures that favor some players over others.

At the core sits basic internet access. As discussed in Chapter 5 in WIPR 2026, without it, the wider spread of digital technologies stalls before it starts, especially in developing economies where the digital divide remains wide. In 2025, internet use reached 74 percent of the world's population. That number hides a stark gap: only 36 percent of Africans are online, compared to 92 percent of Europeans. Despite this divide, the gap in mobile communication technology usage intensity has been narrowing.

The divide runs deeper than access. It shows up in infrastructure, technology, usage, and financing. This gap shapes who benefits from digital transformation, and who waits.

Infrastructure as Gatekeeper

Among the barriers, infrastructure sits at the foundation. Without physical networks in place, no amount of skills training or affordable pricing can get technology into people's hands.

Backbone internet infrastructure acts as both gatekeeper and enabler. It is the layer that determines whether a country can plug into the global digital economy at all, and at what cost. Submarine cables are a clear example of this dynamic in action.

More than 99 percent of international internet traffic travels through submarine cables, not satellites. These undersea lines form the physical foundation that everything else, from mobile apps to cloud computing, depends on. When they work, they open doors. When they break, they close them, often for the regions that can least afford it.

When the backbone breaks

Submarine cable faults are usually caused by ordinary maritime activity, like ship anchors and fishing nets, rather than sabotage or natural disasters. But the routine nature of these faults does not make their impact any less serious.

The effect of a cable break depends on how much redundancy a region has built into its network. Regions with many cables and alternate routes can reroute traffic quickly. Regions with only a handful of cables have far fewer options, and a single fault can take down connectivity for an entire country. The chart below shows how this plays out across regions.

What the chart shows

Sub-Saharan Africa bears the heaviest burden. The region records the highest total disruption days, and repair days linked to submarine cable faults of any region tracked between 2008 and 2020.
Fewer cables mean fewer backup routes. Regions with dense cable networks, like East Asia and the Pacific or Europe and Central Asia, recover faster because traffic can reroute elsewhere.
Repair delays compound the damage. Long repair times in Sub-Saharan Africa extend outages well beyond the initial fault, deepening the impact on connectivity and economic activity.

The gap is structural, not incidental. The pattern repeats across the dataset, pointing to a persistent infrastructure gap rather than isolated bad luck.

Building resilient foundations

Barriers to diffusion often interact, creating overlapping constraints that single-issue policy approaches struggle to overcome. Resolving foundational infrastructure can be a game changer. Digital technologies cannot diffuse through a region if the underlying infrastructure cannot support them. Submarine cables show this clearly: a break in a cable most people will never see can stall internet access for millions.

Closing this gap means investing in cable redundancy, faster repair capacity, and diversified routes, particularly in regions where a single point of failure can still take down an entire country's connectivity. Infrastructure alone will not solve every barrier to digital adoption, but without it, none of the other solutions can reach the people who need them most.