How the Internet Travels Across Oceans

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/10/technology/internet-cables-oceans.html

by anuragsoni • 7 years ago

365 160 7 years ago

If anyone is interested in a really well written travel essay about how one of those cables was installed in the 90s, this one never seems to get old: https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

EvangelicalPig• 7 years ago

Cryptonomicon/Reamde sized too!

(It's a expression, but I'm sure someone else will get it :) )

auvi• 7 years ago

~41530 words

nemild• 7 years ago

And for an older take, I loved this book on the first transatlantic telegraph cable as a child:

Cyrus Field's Big Dream: The Daring Effort to Lay the First Transatlantic Telegraph Cable

frosted-flakes• 7 years ago

For more on the history of the telegraph, I recommend The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage, which also covers in detail the laying of the first trans-Atlantic cables. Fascinating stuff.

lb1lf9• 7 years ago

I have a quite good book on the shelves on the very same subject, but I am unable to locate it at present.

For a slightly wider take, Arthur C. Clarke's "How the world was one" is a most readable account of how telecommunications has made the world smaller, starting with the first submarine cables, proceeding with satellites (of course he would!) before devoting a section to fibre optics at the end. Brilliant account.

acomjean• 7 years ago

There is a museum on the cape cod massachusetts called the "French Cable Station Museum", that has a lot of the old euqipment used back to transmit telegraph data from Europe to America. Its not open year round apparently.

I did the tour a few year ago, run be retired engineer who was enthusiastic and excellent at explaining the difficulties in getting it all working.

As an added bonus, old school html:

http://www.frenchcablestationmuseum.org/index.htm

gkanai2• 7 years ago

Stephenson's "Mother Earth, Mother Board" is still, I believe, the longest piece published in Wired. A tremendous piece that still holds up.

jillesvangurp• 7 years ago

Here's the link for Neal Stephenson's Motherboard Earth: https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

Indeed well worth a read even this long after it was published.

cjjl• 7 years ago

Thanks! Somehow I missed this essay, looking forward to reading in later tonight.

Interesting to note that submarine cables played a significant part in the plot of Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.

rosege• 7 years ago

There is also this book Tubes by Andrew Blum about the cables: https://www.amazon.com/Tubes-Journey-Internet-Andrew-Blum/dp...

Someone gave it to me at a previous job but never left a note to say who so I couldn't thank them.

bpp• 7 years ago

Came here just to post this link; it's really stuck with me over the years.

bitxbitxbitcoin• 7 years ago

How the Governments Physically Look at the Internet that Travels Across Oceans. [1]

[1] https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/russian-spy-submarine...

blancheneige• 7 years ago

kinda funny that the headline reads "Russian Spy Submarines Are Tampering with Undersea Cables" while the article does not provide actual evidence that Russian Spy Submarines Are Tampering with Undersea Cables. maybe they were just trying to sow discord into the cables.

godelmachine4• 7 years ago

Would anyone kindly name a major company that install these mammoth cables underneath oceans?

Surely they should be huge in valuation yet hidden away from the public glare.

shereadsthenews• 7 years ago

They are built by the usual telecom and heavy industry names like Alcatel and NEC.

lclarkmichalek2• 7 years ago

I wouldn't say they're that hidden. Marea (MS & FB trans atlantic cable) has a nice promotional site with videos and suchlike: https://news.microsoft.com/marea/

karambahh• 7 years ago

Orange is a big player on this market, probably thanks to the fact that (as another user mentioned) Alcatel is one of the largest manufacturer (both historical french companies).

You can follow Jean-Luc Vuillemin [0] on Twitter for very interesting pictures of ships laying cables around the world.

One of the largest undersea cables plant is Alcatel in Calais, France (Dover straits). The factory is linked to the port by huge tunnels under the city. Unfortunately the Wikipedia page is only available in french but contains nice pictures[1]

[0] https://twitter.com/jlvuillemin [1]https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcatel_Submarine_Networks

godelmachine4• 7 years ago

Checked out the Twitter feed.

Really great!

lb1lf9• 7 years ago

Tyco / TE Subcom and Japan's NTT are two of the major players.

gkanai2• 7 years ago

KDDI both builds transoceanic cable and has ships to install them.

http://www.k-kcs.co.jp/english/cableShipKOL.html

http://news.kddi.com/kddi/corporate/english/newsrelease/2017...

bibyte• 7 years ago

I remember discovering them when I was young and thinking how mundane it is. I also thought that satellites are a integral part of the internet just like the TV network.

est313• 7 years ago

Related map of submarine cables on the globe (with clickable links for the cables): https://www.submarinecablemap.com

vxNsr2• 7 years ago

This is perfect.

Can't tell you the number of times I've had someone insist that the internet was on satellites.

Using terms like "the cloud" and with everything bring wireless definitely doesnt help with people's misconceptions.

Even after I carefully explain that the internet uses under sea cables and generally either buried wires or above ground stuff I get dubious looks they say "yeah, right. You're probably just confused..."

vidro3• 7 years ago

Can't tell you the number of times I've had someone insist that the internet was on satellites.

It has to go to space!

vxNsr2• 7 years ago

Are you referencing the Louis CK thing? I cringe every time I see that.

SnowingXIV• 7 years ago

I'd hear that all the time too but satellites do play a role. I'm just unsure exactly how they fit in.

lovich• 7 years ago

Inside the ship, workers spool the cable into cavernous tanks. One person walks the cable swiftly in a circle, as if laying out a massive garden hose, while others lie down to hold it in place to ensure it doesn’t snag or knot. Even with teams working around the clock, it takes about four weeks before the ship is loaded up with enough cable to hit the open sea.

How is that not automated? I cant believe that companies would rely on humans doing a boring and repetitive task without error for weeks on end when a single error could cause double digit percentage of time at port. Is this is just such an uncommon task that automating this wasnt worth the time saved at port?

edit: Even in the picture in the article you can see a single worker has removed their shoe covers that all the other employees are wearing[1]. Doesnt that degrade the cable right there?

[1]https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/2019/02/15/undersea-ca...

lclarkmichalek2• 7 years ago

The cable is going to be sitting in the sea. Shoes are likely not the biggest issue it will face in its lifetime.

dsfyu404ed• 7 years ago

The cable will never again have the rest of the cable on top of it. I'd be slightly worried about sand/dirt facilitating chafing/abrasion in the outer layers of cable on its way to its final resting place. Shoes shouldn't be an issue as long as you can keep mud caked work boots out.

lb1lf9• 7 years ago

I work for a company which make the full deployment line for submarine cable laying ships; first time I visited one -Incidentally, a sister ship of the CS Durable referenced in this article- I wondered about the precise same thing you did, beginning to sketch solutions in my mind while looking down into the tanks.

A supervisor comes over to me and says something like "I can see what you are thinking. There's no use - it is cheaper this way."

The point was that while the ship was in port taking on cable, it was fully manned anyway. Crews need something to do - so might as well stow cable.

That's our kit in the topside photos. Small world!

) We do all sorts of other things as well - relying on cable laying alone would be too much of a niche market!

michaelt2• 7 years ago

  The point was that while the ship was in port taking on
  cable, it was fully manned anyway. Crews need something 
  to do - so might as well stow cable.

Right, but if they could take on cable faster couldn't they get under way faster? Four weeks to load a ship sounds like a long time.

RileyJames• 7 years ago

I’ve blown a few minds explaining that the Internet is delivered via light, sent through very long fiber optic cables under the sea.

I thought this was common knowledge until the first time I explained it, and the disbelief... Everyone had a revelation that day.

I always knew about fiber optics, growing up with dial up and dreaming of one day having a fiber connection. But I guess now that everyone is focused on mobile that piece of infrastructure is abstracted from even reasonably tech savvy people.

stingraycharles2• 7 years ago

How did they think it was done before you explained it to them?

profmonocle• 7 years ago

I’ve met quite a few non technical people who assume the Internet is carried by satellite.

libraryofbabel• 7 years ago

I asked this question to a class of smart 18-19 yo college students a few years ago. Almost everyone thought it was done with some kind of wireless transmission (e.g. "by satellite"). The idea that it was physical cables lying in the mud of the sea bed was a revelation.

joering2• 7 years ago

I recently visited friend at his lab. I cannot say much but they work on patent for something he calls “pantone fiber”. Basically within one cable they are able to squeeze about 16,000 different shades of R/G/B “working” next to each other. When I grasp the idea it blew my mind - he looked at me and smiled saying - “yeah about 10,000 times faster than current fiber”. He said two things tho - one state of tech is not ready for such speeds and latency - unlesn you have 16K def TV. Second he said they wont release it until much more cable has been layed out. So that of course they can restart relaying new cable again and make more $ ;)

akg_67• 7 years ago

Did your friend say 10,000 times faster or 10,000 times bandwidth? By using different color simultaneously , you can stuff more data but I can’t imagine it becoming faster than speed of light it already travels at.

robkop• 7 years ago

Isn't this just an advancement on wavelength division multiplexing?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-division_multiple...

jve• 7 years ago

https://xkcd.com/1053/

puzzledobserver• 7 years ago

Aside: Is it just me, or do others find animated charts annoying? It takes me time to understand what's being shown, and before the realization has sunk in, the graphic restarts causing the whole mental process to restart. Rather like a strobe light.

FabHK3• 7 years ago

Agreed. I'd love to examine the map as of today, or 2021, say, in some detail and whoops - it's gone. Wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, there - aaaand gone. No controls to stop it or skip to a specific year. Very annoying.

mongol2• 7 years ago

I always wondered if there are not problems in the spot a new cable is laid to cross an older cable.

dmlittle2• 7 years ago

Unlike data cables which cary information with a voltage, fiber optic cables carry information through light impulses. An advantage being that light is not susceptible to electromagnetic interference or radio frequencies. Having multiple fiber optic cables next to each other doesn't cause any issues.

The electromagnetic interference between cables is the reason why you shouldn't wire a house with data cables and power cables next to each other.

martin_a• 7 years ago

I think his thoughts are more like "what if you need to do something with the cable that lays under the other one?" At least that's what I'm wondering about. ;-)

Oren-T• 7 years ago

Old but good article by Neal Stephenson

https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass

gtr32x• 7 years ago

Interestingly I was just thinking about this the other day, and hoping that someone here would have the answer. I'm really curious what is the total bandwidth per second across different continently globally without accounting for intra-continent bandwidth?

afterburner2• 7 years ago

Didn't realize Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple outright own some of those cables.

NegatioN• 7 years ago

That's exactly what I was thinking as well. And what's more, it seems like they are laying more new cables than what "public" infrastructure is, going forward.

That can literally mean GooFaceAma has better global performance than competitors. Or that competitors will be forced to get hosted on one of those cloud providers to get similar performance.

It makes me feel a bit worried that "the internet" is not as neutral as I would like it to be. (Or that I thought it was before)

FabHK3• 7 years ago

Weird, the article always mentions Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon, but then once at the end in a footnote does mention "Apple, Google, Microsoft or Netflix".

I'm left wondering whether it's Amazon or Apple or both that own some of those cables.

afterburner2• 7 years ago

Whoops I meant Amazon (from the map).

cm21872• 7 years ago

What I find fascinating is that they also have many repeaters given the massive distances covered by these cables so they need to provide electricity through the cables on such long distances.

lordnacho4• 7 years ago

I've rented some of these lines as part of a financial trading infrastructure.

What's immediately obvious is the line is much faster than going over the public internet, and there's no jitter: every time you ping it comes back in the same amount of time, whereas the internet pings will vary by several ms.

You also become acutely aware of cable breaks. Somehow this happens quite often under the English Channel. The network operator will start sending you emails that say

- Cable break detected

- Loading ship (can take ages)

- Found the break

- Patched it

- Back up

Occasionally bad weather would delay it.

gear54rus• 7 years ago

How costly is such renting?

6nf2• 7 years ago

You're unlikely to rent the whole thing so it just depends on how much bandwidth you need. If it's only a couple of TB per month it's not that expensive.

renholder2• 7 years ago

You also become acutely aware of cable breaks. Somehow this happens quite often under the English Channel.

You're not lying. :) When the internet is down in the ROI (Republic of Ireland), it's always because something was dragging along the seabed and cut the cable[s].

Given that the ROI doesn't have many IX's for international connection[0,1,2], it's quite hard to miss when it does happen.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Neutral_Exchange

[1] https://www.inex.ie/technical/network-diagram/

[2] https://www.submarinecablemap.com/#/country/ireland

ksec3• 7 years ago

I had always had the illusion that Ireland was well connected to US and EU. Given how many tech company have Data Centre in there. Quite Strange its IX isn't as good as it could be.

Off Topic:

Is the short form (Republic of Ireland) ROI used often? Because the first thing that springs to mind reading ROI is Return of Investment.

Isn't Ireland short enough as a word? I understand there is Northern Ireland, but people will actually put Northern In front of it to be specific. Like North Korea instead of Korea.

ksec3• 7 years ago

Somehow this happens quite often under the English Channel.

How often? Once or twice a year?

And what were the reason it breaking so often? I thought the English Channel were quite free of Cargo Ships and the like.

jstanley• 7 years ago

I thought the English Channel were quite free of Cargo Ships and the like.

The English Channel is the busiest shipping lane in the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzJwXxUY3MM

jvanloov• 7 years ago

http://www.bognorregisbeach.co.uk/live-shipping-map-english-...

:-)

dspillett• 7 years ago

I thought the English Channel were quite free of

Very much not:

http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/busiest-sh... (1999)

https://www.marineinsight.com/marine-navigation/the-strait-o... (2017)

There is some discussion to be had as to whether there are other sections of water that are more active and have been for some years, but even if the channel isn't the busiest it is certainly very busy.

lordnacho4• 7 years ago

I think more than twice a year when I was renting it.

lb1lf9• 7 years ago

-Educated guess is that cargo vessels aren't much of a problem. Anything dropping anchor, dredging or somehow doing stuff on the bottom, on the other hand...

Further, I'd wager that initially buried cable in the Channel often is exposed on the bottom due to strong currents, rendering it more vulnerable - but this is just a guess, mind.

apaprocki2• 7 years ago

One thing I’ve consistently noticed is that a “network” can tell the tale of natural or man-made disasters in terms of how it first manifests in alarms and breakage in various systems, the human response manifested to respond to it (sometimes across many national boundaries), culminating with the sometimes peculiar “hacks” and temporary solutions conjured up to restore connectivity. The network sees everything and no one ever tells these stories in any meaningful detail.

kiallmacinnes2• 7 years ago

I'd be very curious what the timelines between each step looks like.. any insight?

lordnacho4• 7 years ago

Everyone knows immediately when the line is down, and which line it is.

If the ship is ready it seems to take a day or so to get to the site. There's not always a ship though, not sure how it's organized.

Another day at the site and it's done. But any weather blows up the schedule seemingly.

I've never received anything other than emails about this so I'm not actually an expert.

bogomipz2• 7 years ago

"I've rented some of these lines as part of a financial trading infrastructure."

Unless you were lighting that fiber yourself you were renting wavelengths and not the physical fiber.

"What's immediately obvious is the line is much faster than going over the public internet, and there's no jitter: every time you ping it comes back in the same amount of time, whereas the internet pings will vary by several ms"

Jitter is caused by congestion which happens at router interfaces. The absence of jitter is not due to the use of dedicated submarine fiber spans per se as the speed of light in fiber is a constant. What you are likely seeing is the result of a network operator who has optimized for low and consistent latency by having fewer hops in their network before and after the cable landing stations.

lordnacho4• 7 years ago

Yeah that's right, I guess it could read like them being underwater matters. Point was that being private and optimised made the jitter go away.

peter303• 7 years ago

General purpose computers networks and software are far from optimal for high speed trading. A few years back ACM Communications published a comprehensive white paper of trading communications bottlenecks including the effect of virtual memory page faults and TCP/IP collisions. Dedicated trade networks want custom software without virtualization features. Or if you dont want to develop that much, use the ancient real time UNIX NASA has in its space probes like VxWorks.

In a few weeks there is annindie film called The Hummingbird Project about avrace between firms to build the fastest dedicated trading line.

spelunker• 7 years ago

The book Flash Boys by Michael Lewis covers HFT in general and a similar fiber optic line built by Spread Networks in 2010. It's definitely a fascinating world.

Apparently HFT's have moved on to microwave (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-08/the-gazil...) to gain a further edge over fiber optic.

lprd2• 7 years ago

This is so neat! Few questions though, if anyone can answer:

1) The cable still looks pretty thin, is it being housed in some sort of protective layer/tube before it is laid? Seems like an anchor snag could easily break that line. If that happens, is it possible to 'patch' a fiber cable?

2) Once it nears the coast, how deep is the line being buried?

3) This may be a dumb question (I'm no engineer), but does the light travel from the source all the way to end without any "relay" mechanism?

4) How much bandwidth can travel through one of these lines?

lota-putty• 7 years ago

5) Does anyone know how to save that(cabling-world) animated image alone? All I can make out is 'g-map' div ;-)

Moru2• 7 years ago

Make window fullscreen, press Windows-G on a Windows 10 computer with halfway good graphics card. Pump it into VLC and crop away the stuff you don't want ... and profit? :-)

factsaresacred2• 7 years ago

Here you go: https://giant.gfycat.com/UnderstatedLinedBird.gif

est313• 7 years ago

That animated image is made up of a canvas background of the world and an SVG foreground of the cables. Both are created using js from downloaded json data, ne_110m.json and fusion-cables-2019-02-27-simplified.json. Quite tough to get that into something that's not using pixel graphics and self-contained (aka only displaying the stuff in the page).

lb1lf9• 7 years ago

1) The fibre pairs are housed in multiple layers of armor to protect against the elements, supply power to inline amplifiers and -most notably- provide the structural strength needed to survive being deployed. Outside diameter is still less than one inch, though.

2) Depends, but a metre or two (tops!) would be the right ballpark.

3) Not a dumb question; while loss in fibre optic cable is very low, repeaters are installed at regular intervals along the cable. they are powered by high-voltage DC supplied through the cable armor. The ocean acts as the return path.

4) Lots.

turboman2• 7 years ago

3) is wrong. The amplifiers are powered by DC, but one side of the fiber provides positive voltage and the other negative - the ocean is not a part of the circuit.

bogomipz2• 7 years ago

"3) Not a dumb question; while loss in fibre optic cable is very low, repeaters are installed at regular intervals along the cable. they are powered by high-voltage DC supplied through the cable armor. The ocean acts as the return path."

That's incorrect, amplification is done via Erbium doping, it is part of the core of the cable. There are no external repeaters.

ioulian• 7 years ago

1: I think they don't put that thin cable on the seafloor, they are bunched together, in a much bigger cable with a lot of stuff around it [0] to protect it.

About the patching, they say that in the article: they sometimes cut the cable (in case of a bad weather) and attach it to a buoy. So they can "patch it" ;)

[0] http://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-c...

jlgaddis• 7 years ago

I'm on an iPad at the moment so I can't give you a direct link to any videos, but search for Hibernia Atlantic on Youtube. They have some short videos showing how the cables are laid, repaired, and so on.

rassibassi2• 7 years ago

Recent graduate in Optical Communications here :)

1) The fiber is pretty thin, but there are several fibers combined in one transoceanic cable, see here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable. They don't patch them, but splice the fibers. Patching introduces a little loss, so it should be avoided.

2) Not sure how deep they are buried, but I think to remember that the shore end of a submarine cable is better protected than the part in the deep ocean. Due to more ship traffic at the coast etc.

3) Good question. The loss of an optical fiber is roughly 0.2 dB/km. Across the ocean the optical signal must be amplified several times (every 80-100km). Nowadays the amplification is all optical (EDFA or Raman). Before there were electrical regeneration schemes. Check out the history of the field, it's is quite interesting [1].

4) Not sure how much data such a cable can carry, since it depends on how many fibers are deployed within. However, there are multiple interesting things to look into here. In research labs, people are investigating multicore/multimode fibers (space division multiplexing) [2], these fiber have incredible capacity. Personally, I think the most interesting metric is the spectral efficiency, so how much data can be transmitted per second per Herz. Such a metric is independent of multiplexing schemes over space/wavelength/time, and improvements have to come from better devices, signal processing or signal shaping methods [3]. Another mind-blowing area is using the nonlinear Fourier transform for better signaling methods [4].

Feel free to ask more questions :)

and checkout the two biggest conferences for more in depth info.

https://www.ofcconference.org/en-us/home/

https://www.ecocexhibition.com/

[1] https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/abstract.cfm?URI=oe-26-18-2...

[2] Multicore: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7341685

Multimode: https://www.osapublishing.org/abstract.cfm?uri=ofc-2018-Th4C...

Multimode+core: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8535233

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04073

[4] https://www.osapublishing.org/optica/abstract.cfm?uri=optica...

lprd2• 7 years ago

Looks like I got some reading material for tonight! Really appreciate your response, this is all very fascinating to me.

Cheers :)

ativzzz2• 7 years ago

With a degree in Optical Communications, are you trying to go into Optical Engineering or pursue further education in academia? How is the salary for the engineer compared to software?

apaprocki2• 7 years ago

4. Undersea should be the same as under land — 9.6Tbps, 96 100Gbps fibers.

wyred• 7 years ago

I don't think it's right to say data is in the ocean though. They are stored in datacenters on land. And they travel through the ocean. Unless when we start putting more of these datacenters in the ocean like how some company has been experimenting with.

cyberjunkie• 7 years ago

I have a certain admiration and appreciation for this sort of thing, and every article that describes how the internet is physically interconnected.

Having seen internet connectivity in India slowly grow from only satellite-based connectivity, to having private internal interconnecting hubs within the country for bandwidth providers and ISPs to reduce latency, then news of every new submarine line improving bandwidth and latency, thereby reducing pricing. Going from getting 135ms - 200ms via dialup locally, to getting 60ms to Singapore and Hong Kong while playing Counter Strike and Quake 3. It was such a high!

Each development was so critical and it brought me great joy, and excitement. Still does!

godelmachine4• 7 years ago

I read this somewhere that Russia was tying to snoop on US by attaching these cables with electronic surveillance equipments.

IIRC military and defect corps have separate cables installed for themselves, and the Russian’s were trying to read the signals.

Would someone tell more about it or add the Wikipedia page here please?

omeid22• 7 years ago

Huh, it was the other way around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells

godelmachine4• 7 years ago

Pardon my sieve-like memory.

I should had clarified I am quite dim visaged about it.

factsaresacred2• 7 years ago

The ship will carry enough supplies to last at least 60 days: roughly 200 loaves of bread...

Unless Jesus is one of the crew members, that isn't nearly enough.

michaelt2• 7 years ago

Perhaps they don't freeze it, so having more than ~10 days of bread would mean throwing out mouldy bread?

omeid22• 7 years ago

The graph showing the shift of undersea cable shares from public internet backbone to private companies is concerning.

FabHK3• 7 years ago

Yes, very much so, in particular in conjunction with attacks on net neutrality. I hope at least some regulators/politicians stay on top of this.

black-tea• 7 years ago

The first undersea cable was laid in 1858 and what's funny is the two guys on either end couldn't agree on voltages and currents etc. and would destroy each other's equipment. It seems silly until you remember that the only way they could communicate is via post, which took 7 days, or the very cable they were working on.

uvu• 7 years ago

Someone who wants to learn about the internet. Check out the KhanAcademy one https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-science/inter...

OliverJones• 7 years ago

Interesting stuff. Just as important to education as "how to make a car" was 50 years ago.

Things not covered in this article: Expected carrying capacity? How much dark fiber (initially unused capacity)? How much extra cable is required to make sure it stays on the bottom even when going over oceanic mountain ranges? How much of the ocean-floor survey data is open, how much is proprietary, and how much is (military-style) secret?

Is there any sabotage? Do nav charts warn about these things?

pault• 7 years ago

I don't have any links handy, but I have definitely read reports of sabotage and wiretapping.

Edit: ah, from another comment down-thread: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells

anonu• 7 years ago

When I went to Fiji a few years back I was astounded by the quality of the internet considering we were in a remote part of the South Pacific. Turns out Fiji is a "layover" for all the underground cables coming from the US West coast to Australia...

pcardoso• 7 years ago

Related: Arthur C Clarke has a very interesting non-fiction book about the early days of submarine cables. "Voice across the sea".

vs4vijay• 7 years ago

Might wanna read this as well: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/how-t...

samtp• 7 years ago

What happens when they reach the edges of tectonic plates (like in the middle of the Atlantic)? I'd imagine the heat would melt the cables quite easily.

raviolo2• 7 years ago

Lasers propel data down the threads at nearly the speed of light

This is funny. Why “nearly”?

longhorn_alum• 7 years ago

Because no vacuum

detaro• 7 years ago

Might be weird wording for the fact that speed of light in glass fibre is slower than in air or vacuum.

chrisrogers• 7 years ago

Fiber optic cabling won't transmit at the speed of light due to the refractive index of the medium. So it's slower than the speed of light in a vacuum or atmosphere.

dagw• 7 years ago

When people colloquially say "speed of light" it understood to mean the speed of light in a vacuum. Light travels slower the higher the refractive index of the medium its travelling through. Saying "nearly the speed of light" indicates that the light is travelling through a medium with a refractive index very close to 1.

raviolo2• 7 years ago

To say that light travels at “nearly the speed of light” in any medium is a bad choice of words. Also with refraction coefficient of 1.40 - 1.45 in fiber, the term “nearly” is not appropriate if the intention was to compare with vacuum.

justaj• 7 years ago

Last year, Australia stepped in to block the Chinese technology giant Huawei from building a cable connecting Australia to the Solomon Islands, for fear it would give the Chinese government an entry point into its networks.

I don't really understand this move. Surely the way that the Internet is designed, you can connect any network to any network. Why would this be any different with a physical cable in terms of security?

ativzzz2• 7 years ago

I don't think most politicians understand how the internet works

cocochanel• 7 years ago

This is exactly the reason why I like DigitalOcean name so much.

brianzelip• 7 years ago

Nice visualization at the intro on desktop+. I wonder if Rich Harris and his team were behind it? See recent changelog podcast featuring Rich Harris on being 'a javascript journalist'[0]. Harris is author of the 'magical disappearing UI framework', svelte[1].

[0]http://changelog.com/podcast/332 [1] https://svelte.technology/

ratsimihah• 7 years ago

Can someone just dive and cut cables?

How the Internet Travels Across Oceans

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