Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible

[Nevilledog]

https://www.wired.com/story/say-goodbye-to-the-undersea-cable-that-made-the-global-internet-possible/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/Egyy4

SHARKS ARE INNOCENT. Or at least they’re not eating the internet. As a family of cartilaginous fish, sharks are collectively not guilty of most, if not all, charges of biting, chomping, chewing, or otherwise attacking the underwater network of fiber-optic cables. The people who build and maintain the nearly 600 subsea cables that carry almost all of our intercontinental traffic—supporting just about every swipe, tap, Zoom, and doomscroll anywhere on the planet—have a love-hate relationship with this myth, which has persisted for decades. They might even hate that I’m starting this piece with it.

If a cable is suspended over the seabed, a shark might gum it as it explores. Sometimes they’ll lunge for a cable that’s being pulled out of the water. But for a shark to actually bite a cable, you’d have to wrap it in fish, much as you’d hide a pill in a hunk of cheese for the dog. Rats can be a threat on land, because their incisors never stop growing, so they like to file them down on semisoft cables. But nobody ever asks about rats, maybe because, as a friend of mine pointed out, “sharks make you cool, but rats sound like you have a problem.”

Sometimes people ask about satellites or, especially in Sweden (where I live), about alleged sabotage in the Baltic Sea. But historically, shark bites have commanded the most attention. The myth began nearly 40 years ago, with the development of a subsea fiber-optic cable known as TAT-8. TAT-8 practically invented the concept of an internet cable, and now that it’s ready for retirement, I spent time with the offshore workers, crew members, and engineers who are in the process of pulling it off the seabed. That’s the real story of subsea cables—not sabotage or sharks, but the humans who take care of the physical stuff that keeps all of our digital communication flowing.

FIBER-OPTIC TRANSMISSION IS a near-magical way of carrying information by pulses of light. Most people don’t even think about how quickly we’ve accepted instantaneous communication as normal, even those of us who can remember when an international phone call had to be booked in advance. The more people I meet in this industry, in this network of networks of people and things, the more insulting it sounds to hear that “we” only notice it when it breaks. (Who is this “we,” I always want to know?) Billions of people are able to walk around not noticing this infrastructure because of the daily work of a few thousand people, sometimes at sea, other times buried under piles of permits, surveys, and purchase orders for thousands of kilometers of cables that will join the millions of kilometers of cables on the seabed that ensure that our planet is continuously being hugged by light.

*snip*

[Deep State Witch]

1. Map of Undersea cables

You can look at TeleGeography to see a current map of undersea cables. It's pretty cool.

https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

[leftstreet]

2. Wow

Thanks for posting that

[Deep State Witch]

3. You're Welcome!

I found it fascinating.

[fujiyamasan]

5. Very cool link

Thanks for sharing

[yellow dahlia]

4. Bookmarking to read later.