Recommendation 8

The Government’s resilience concept focuses too much on ‘having lots of cables’. This pays insufficient attention to the network’s actual capacity to absorb shocks and does not account for onshore vulnerabilities and long-term trends towards a more brittle system. There is also limited understanding of much damage the system can sustain before data stops rerouting properly, triggering temporary systemic connectivity failure. This does not appear to feature as a serious consideration in the Government’s contingency planning. (Conclusion, Paragraph 62)