DOWNL TO THE WIRE: THE SHIP FIXING OUR INTERNET

Africa's connection to the World Wide Web depends on cords of hair-thin fibres that rope along the ocean floor. Sometimes they break. Jess Auerbach Jahajeeah joined the crew of the Léon Thévenin, one of only a select few ships that are able to fix them

- JESS AUERBACH JAHAJEEAH

IT IS PAST MIDNIGHT. A FOUR-PERSON REPAIR TEAM IS WORKING A DOUBLE SHIFT to splice together one of the undersea cables that carry the Internet between Africa and the rest of the world. It is delicate, highly skilled, and labour-intensive work. The speed of your Internet connection depends on them getting it right.

The four are among the nearly 60 crew members on board the Léon Thévenin, sub-Saharan Africa’s only dedicated fibre-optic-repair vessel. This is its longest-ever voyage – close to four months almost continuously out at sea. It will head for Cape Town in the morning, provided the four-person repair team, and the crew supporting them, get the job done.

As they work, they joke and laugh but they are desperate to get back to their families. Shurro Arendse has never been away this long before and his children are aching to see their father. Birthdays have been missed, school exams come and gone. Several other men on board have infants. They talk about their children all the time but it’s not the same as holding them.

The repair team were trained, at a specialist institute in France, to handle the hair-thin fibre optic cables that carry the Internet itself and to operate the many machines necessary to fix the break.

They work through the night with glass, copper, steel, plastic, and rubber – some of it electrified, some of it fragile and all of it interconnected. When the cable returns to the sea bed, each section must be able to withstand multiple tonnes of elemental force in all conditions.

It is along these cables that all your emails, YouTube videos, Google search results and irreverent memes have to flow.