Your Data’s Strange Undersea Voyage
November 19, 2024 at 07:57PMIf you think your first dial-up modem was slow, consider: the first undersea communications cable was laid in 1866 and took 16 hours to deliver a 98-character telegraph from the UK to the US. Today there are hundreds of thousands of miles of cable running along the bottom of the ocean, much of it duplicative, so you can Instagram with no lag—but only a single cable runs to Tonga, which ended up severed from all global communications when a piece of that cable was destroyed by an undersea volcano eruption. The internet really is just a bunch of tubes, most of them are in the ocean, and installing and maintaining them is no small feat.
For so long, the online world has been so available that its heavenly omnipresence is simply assumed. We pick up a smartphone or open our laptops, and our consciousness is seamlessly transported to wherever—be it the ear of your grandmother in Budapest, a hotel reservation site in Jakarta, or an office meeting in Oslo—all at almost the speed of light. But the experience of the Tongans exposes that apparent ubiquity as something a little more precarious. The online world doesn’t simply rain down from The Cloud: It is transported by something far more tangible, far removed from the weightless data swirls that appear to emanate from Silicon Valley. All the electrons of information stored on the internet’s servers may only weigh as much as an apple—but it takes a couple million pounds of wire to get them to your screens.
For the internet to be the truly global service that it is, many of these wires—most of them no thicker than a garden hose—are sunk full fathom five across the bottom of the ocean, where they lay alarmingly vulnerable to fishing nets, ship anchors, currents, shark bites, scuba divers with saws, earthquakes, and, of course, volcanoes. These slender strands of mega-charged fiberoptic cables moving terabits per second account for 95 percent of all international data and voice transfers—volumes that blow satellites out of the sky.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/11/19/your-datas-strange-undersea-voyage/
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