In this episode of Untangling Web3, Tim Creswick, founder and CEO of Vorboss, explains the physical and technical infrastructure behind the internet—what it is, how it moves data, and why fibre networks are the foundation of modern connectivity.

With a focus on metro fibre, subsea cables, and security vulnerabilities, Tim provides a high-resolution breakdown of how the internet really functions beneath the surface, and what Web3, AI, and future technologies need to scale.

Key highlights:

• Subsea Cables vs. Satellites: Most global internet traffic travels through undersea fibre optic cables, not satellites. While satellite systems like Starlink are impressive, they are capacity-limited and latency-prone compared to physical fibre. Deep sea cables—laid across oceans since the 1800s—enable ultra-high bandwidth and lower latency, critical for everything from global messaging to financial trading. Satellite systems are best used as edge solutions, not core infrastructure.
• Why Fibre is Still the Gold Standard: Fibre provides massive bandwidth, low latency, and physical isolation. Fibre strands the width of human hair can transmit signals over hundreds of kilometres with very low signal loss. Unlike wireless radio, which is shared and lossy, fibre is point-to-point and can be upgraded by simply improving transceivers and optical encoding. Innovations in amplitude and frequency modulation continue to increase the data throughput without replacing the cable itself.
• Security and Surveillance Risks: Bulk surveillance is a major vulnerability of existing infrastructure. State actors have intercepted fibre cables, tampered with hardware during shipping, and installed implants to siphon data. End-to-end encryption mitigates some of these risks, but metadata (who’s talking to whom and when) can still be weaponized. Even secure enclaves can be compromised if devices are intercepted before delivery. The weakest point is often not the cryptography, but the hardware or physical layer.

The internet is not wireless magic—it is a massively coordinated physical system of cables, fibre, routers, and commercial agreements. As applications like Web3, AI, and real-time cloud computing grow, they place increasing strain on this infrastructure.

Scalability, security, and sovereignty begin at the fibre level. To build a resilient digital future, developers, users, and policymakers must better understand the invisible systems that power our online world.

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This episode is sponsored by the VeChain foundation. Learn more about VeBetterDAO here:

https://vebetterdao.org/

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Learn more about Web3 at:

https://untanglingweb3.com/

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Untangling Web3 is brought to you by hosts Jack Davies and Alec Burns, with music by Daniel Paigge. Got a question or topic suggestion? Send us an email at [email protected].

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The views we express here are our own, and do not represent the views of our employers. Nothing discussed or stated in the show should be considered advice.