[HN Gopher] The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the inte...
___________________________________________________________________
The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat
Author : vinnyglennon
Score : 221 points
Date : 2024-04-18 12:16 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| TrailMixRaisin wrote:
| I think I would love the article but the presentation makes it
| necessary hard to enjoy.
| cfn wrote:
| Yes, you run the risk of sea sickness with all the unexpected
| screen scrolling direction changes.
|
| Still a good and interesting article.
| jc_811 wrote:
| I actually loved the presentation of it, kudos to whichever
| team collaborated on it!
| arthens wrote:
| You probably used a well supported device.
|
| I read the article over 3 devices and scrolling can get
| pretty buggy.
| balou23 wrote:
| Yes, absolutely impossible to read
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| I just used Reader mode, didn't even need JavaScript.
|
| Do read it. It's a well written and also very affecting insight
| into the lives of people doing essential work under difficult
| conditions.
| khuey wrote:
| For those who have never seen it, Neal Stephenson's "Mother Earth
| Mother Board" for Wired in 1996 is the must-read classic of this
| genre. Wired seems to have paywalled it recently but it's
| available on archive.org
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20151107094324/https://www.wired...
| gabcoh wrote:
| And if you're craving even more telecoms history after that (as
| I was when I read it a few years ago) Arthur C Clarke's "How
| the World Was One" goes into the history of undersea cables and
| other telecoms technologies
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_World_Was_One
| davidw wrote:
| That immediately came to mind when I saw this article.
| Ajay-p wrote:
| The article is fascinating but the website is a disaster.
|
| This makes it marginally easier to read: https://archive.is/IpfNq
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Isn't the title of this "The Cloud Under The Sea"?
|
| Or at least it was on the other submissions days ago
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| Some news outlets A/B test their headlines.
| dfc wrote:
| ABC.au had a similarly named show on the topic back in December.
| I have to imagine they are related:
|
| https://iview.abc.net.au/show/cloud-under-the-sea/video/NS23...
| underseacables wrote:
| If you find this interesting, I highly recommend the book "Blind
| Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage".
|
| The book discusses "Operation Ivy Bells" whose mission was to tap
| the underwater Soviet communication lines during the Cold War.
| The submarine installed a recording pod onto Soviet cables and
| recorded everything.
|
| _How did they find the cables?_
|
| A technician told a story about growing up on the Mississippi
| river, and how you could often find a sign on the bank, telling
| you that there were underwater cables. He hypothesized that the
| same thing might exist in the Soviet union.
|
| Sure enough, the submarine secretly crept into Soviet water,
| popped the periscope, and found a sign in Russian on the bank,
| saying be careful, underwater cables.
|
| It's rumored that when the Soviets learned of this, they went
| down and found the pods. During disassembly, they found a stamped
| plate deep inside which read "Made in the USA."
| SAS24 wrote:
| Telegeography (cited in the article) publishes an interactive
| submarine cable map: https://www.submarinecablemap.com
|
| You can even buy printed versions:
| https://shop.telegeography.com/collections/telecom-maps/
| manmal wrote:
| Interestingly, I can't see a single line from the US to Russia
| or China (not sure about the latter).
| khuey wrote:
| Not much reason to have direct cables. The parts of Russia
| and the US that are close to each other are very empty, and
| it makes sense to land transpacific cables in Japan or Taiwan
| and pick up traffic there rather than going non-stop to
| China.
| el_benhameen wrote:
| The submarine cable map has long been on my want-to-splurge-
| but-can't-justify list. Would make great office art.
| riffic wrote:
| afloat, more like sunken
| ctenb wrote:
| I stopped after the first 3 slides, since the information density
| is too low and the animation too slow.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the information density is too low_
|
| You failed the marshmallow test [1]. There is a traditional,
| long-form article that presents a rewarding read.
|
| [1]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experim...
| generalizations wrote:
| Marshmallow test assumes the payoff exists and is worth it.
| Does it? Is it? IDK and I don't want to waste time finding
| out. I'm far more interested in information-dense sources
| that let me find out if I want to know what it's offering.
| That's why journal articles have abstracts.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Does it? Is it? IDK and I don 't want to waste time
| finding out_
|
| This is what goes through the toddlers' heads too! Gauging
| credibility is inextricably entangled with patience and
| Kahmeman's System 2 thinking [1][2].
|
| If this were a random article, sure, you shouldn't trust.
| But it's not. It's on _HN_ 's front page.
|
| [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3730121/
|
| [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| The Internet is full of non-marshmallows though, I'm not
| gonna wait around forever for a haribo
| generalizations wrote:
| Given how many non-marshmallow articles are out there on
| the internet, and your apparent risk-reward ratio, I
| wonder if you're the one failing the test. And you
| haven't really justified your original claim that GP
| failed the marshmallow test.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _how many non-marshmallow articles are out there on the
| internet_
|
| Most of the _HN_ front page aren't marshmallows. If you
| believe they are, it's irrational to be here, let alone
| waste time commenting about it.
| generalizations wrote:
| The contents of the HN front page is determined by the HN
| readers, and is not uniformly interesting to all of them.
| It is up to the article presented to the users to prove
| that it is worth the time to read and deserves to be on
| the front page, and this one doesn't to a great job of
| that.
|
| The marshmallow test should have a follow up, where the
| person offering the marshmallow has to prove credibility,
| and the person receiving it has to decide if it's worth
| waiting. Would be an interesting view of human
| interactions.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _marshmallow test should have a follow up, where the
| person offering the marshmallow has to prove credibility_
|
| This thread is becoming a parody of itself. I linked to
| literally this study above [1][2].
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40076494
|
| [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3730121/
| thefz wrote:
| I agree with OP that this presentation is very
| irritating.
| flybrand wrote:
| The kid can see the marshmallow. I can't see the payoff from
| this article.
|
| The kid knows what the payoff is.
|
| The payoff here is unknown.
| Kalium wrote:
| The _article_ fails the marshmallow test - it needs to
| convince people that there is a traditional, long-form
| article that will be a rewarding read from the start.
|
| Only then is the test relevant to humans. Otherwise, all
| that's really being tested is the reader's trust in the
| publisher.
| ajdude wrote:
| I really hate how articles are starting with full page slides
| and animations now. This is the third article that I've seen
| this week following the format. I suppose since two of those
| three were on the HN front page it's a format that works, but
| I guess I'm not the target audience.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| This one is different from most. The visual design is
| consistent, engaging, and well done. The pictures are
| relevant and interesting and complement the text.
|
| I agree that most articles that start with slides are just
| dross, this one is an exception.
| jasode wrote:
| _> You failed the marshmallow test [1]. There is a
| traditional, long-form article that presents a rewarding
| read._
|
| I didn't downvote but reading an _unknown article with
| unknown or non-existent payoff_ is not the same premise as
| The Marshmallow Test because the Stanford experiment
| explicitly specifies the "reward" upfront: _" >, a child was
| offered a choice between one small but immediate reward, or
| two small rewards if they waited for a period of time."_
|
| In contrast, reading unfamiliar articles to _maybe_ get a
| "reward" is a Bayesian Probability. As the one reads each
| sentence that's not engaging, the expectation that there
| might be a "reward" at the end is tainted by the fact that
| most long articles in the past that reader forced themselves
| to finish didn't present a worthwhile reward at the end.
|
| Now, if JumpCrisscross explicitly told the reader that there
| would be a guaranteed mind-blowing insight payoff at the end
| of the long article _before the reader started it_ , then the
| test of that patience would be closer to The Marshmallow
| test.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| It's not a random article. It's been upvoted to the _HN_
| front page.
|
| > _if JumpCrisscross explicitly told the reader that there
| would be a guaranteed mind-blowing insight payoff at the
| end_
|
| I literally said it's "a rewarding read."
| logifail wrote:
| > It's not a random article. It's been upvoted to the HN
| front page.
|
| Time is precious, and I choose not to waste mine on the
| unnecessarily slow consumption of annoyingly-formatted
| articles.
|
| I came across this hypothesis recently:
|
| "A lot of the magic of ChatGPT is nothing to do with AI,
| it's just nice to consume high-quality internet content
| without ads or whacky custom formatting."[0]
|
| [0] https://x.com/maiab/status/1723784023619895489
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Time is precious, and I choose not to waste mine_
|
| We're both commenting on a thread about the value of time
| against about three seconds of scrolling. It's safe to
| say _nobody_ here, myself included, is particularly
| constrained in terms of time and energy.
| nottorp wrote:
| > Time is precious, and I choose not to waste mine on the
| unnecessarily slow consumption of annoyingly-formatted
| articles.
|
| It's also longer than 160 characters, so no matter how
| it's presented it would still be a waste of time innit?
| jasode wrote:
| EDIT reply to your EDIT:
|
| _> I literally said it's "a rewarding read."_
|
| At the risk of stating the obvious, you wrote that reply
| to gp ctenb's comment __after__ he already gave up on the
| article and not __before__. You 'd have to tell him
| _before_ he considered reading the article for it to be
| more analogous to The Marshmallow Test. In other words,
| he can 't "fail" your Marshmallow Test if you never set
| up the proper conditions for the test.
|
| _> It's not a random article. It's been upvoted to the
| HN front page._
|
| Yes, being on the front page is one _potential_ signal of
| quality but HN audience is diverse in reading
| preferences.
|
| Because you happen to like this article and the front
| page upvotes confirms your bias, I just want to go meta
| and point out how some others on HN would dislike this
| type of "long-form human interest" article. My previous
| comments about that
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24270673
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26698153
|
| This thread's article is not a fast-moving explanation
| about undersea cable logistics (e.g. Wendover Productions
| style). Instead, it frames the narrative around people
| such as Mitsuyoshi Hirai with long biographical sentences
| such as this:
|
| _> , Hirai's mind leapt to what would come next: a
| tsunami. Hirai feared these waves more than most people.
| He had grown up hearing the story of how one afternoon in
| 1923, his aunt felt the ground shake, swept up her two-
| year-old brother, and sprinted uphill to the cemetery,
| narrowly escaping floods and fires that killed over
| 100,000 people. That child became Hirai's father, so he
| owed his existence to his aunt's quick thinking.
|
| [...] Hirai's career path is characteristic in its
| circuitousness. Growing up in the 1960s in the industrial
| city of Yokosuka, just down the Miura Peninsula from the
| Ocean Link's port in Yokohama, he worked at his parents'
| fish market from the age of 12. A teenage love of
| American rock 'n' roll led to a desire to learn English,
| which led him to take a job at 18 as a switchboard
| operator at the telecom company KDDI as a means to
| practice. When he was 26, he transferred to a cable
| landing station in Okinawa because working on the beach
| would let him perfect his windsurfing. This was his
| introduction to cable maintenance and also where he met
| his wife. Six years later, his English proficiency got
| him called back to KDDI headquarters to help design Ocean
| Link for KCS, a KDDI subsidiary. _
|
| A lot of readers prefer not to slog through text like
| that if they're really just interested in the undersea
| cables. It's not just the dynamic sliding photos that
| would dissuade potential readers to finish the article
| but the style of writing itself.
|
| EDIT reply to _> Lots of people don't like dense books
| either._
|
| Well, this subthread you replied to was literally
| complaining, " _> , since the information density is too
| low_"
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _lot of readers prefer not to slog through text like
| that_
|
| Sure? Lots of people don't like dense books either.
| That's fine. It's weird that it prompts long-form
| complaint comments, but I admit that's more fun than
| reading.
| tertius wrote:
| Level of annoyance = level of complaint. It's not weird,
| it's to be expected.
| astura wrote:
| >It's not a random article. It's been upvoted to the HN
| front page.
|
| Lol, So? HN front page has plenty of garbage.
| rjmill wrote:
| This article is ADHD-walled. The long load time, the weird
| slide show. Then the first page has a jittery animation that
| makes it impossible for me to actually focus on reading the
| article.
|
| It's less of a marshmallow thing (though I often fail that
| test) and more of an overwhelming impression that the article
| does not want me to read it.
| z_zetetic_z wrote:
| Halfway down the downward scroll is subverted into a left
| -> right scroll.
|
| No - just, no.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _This article is ADHD-walled_
|
| I mean yes, folks with untreated ADHD would fail a
| marshmallow test. Marshmallow test failure doesn't mean
| you're a bad person. It simply signifies impatience and
| trust issues.
| thefz wrote:
| Rather the article failed him.
|
| I closed the page at "from banks to government to TikTok", of
| all the glorious applications of a world wide network, the
| most glaring is teenagers making dance videos.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| That's not failing the marshmallow test, because the reward
| is obvious at the start of the test.
|
| Is the reward obvious for reading any random article? No, but
| it may be there. But I sincerely doubt that you, or anyone,
| devotes themselves to consuming 100% of the content they come
| across on the internet, in hopes for a payoff(which may never
| come) in the end.
| 98codes wrote:
| This article definitely wins my award for the most unnecessary
| scrolljacking -- the animations add no value, are too short,
| and only serve to delay being to read further in the article.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| "The first submarine cable, strung across the English Channel in
| 1850, survived for a single day before -- in what may be
| apocryphal cable industry slander -- a French eel fisherman
| accidentally hooked it, sliced off a piece, and came ashore
| bragging about his discovery of a new type of metal seaweed."
| acomjean wrote:
| It's amazing it worked. Especially "electrical" non fiber optic
| cables.
|
| There is a museum on cape cod which was the end point of some
| early electrical cables (1891). It's kind of interesting.
|
| https://www.frenchcablestationmuseum.org/
|
| Of course eclipsed by the wireless Marconi station..
| voidUpdate wrote:
| I'm sorry, but I hate the recent web trend of scrolling not
| making you scroll, and it instead advances some flashy animation
| Octokiddie wrote:
| For those complaining about the presentation, Safari's "Show
| Reader View" works well. Also supported on Firefox. On Chrome,
| it's complicated.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| However, you will miss a couple of rather cool transitions from
| line-drawn images to moving photographic images. It is
| reminscent of rotoscoping, but not the same. I sense a new art
| form, similar to when those GIFs with only a single moving
| object appeared some years ago.
| htrp wrote:
| TLDR: They're telling the story of the boat crews that lay and
| repair all of the submarine fiber optic cable and puts a human
| face behind it all.
|
| It's actually a very good read.
| eggy wrote:
| I guess I am biased to like the article including it's
| presentation, since I spent 6 years as a technical diver fixing
| underwater hydraulics and electrical systems, but at much
| shallower depths than the undersea cables. A buddy of mine is an
| ROV operator for pipe-laying ships. Cool stuff, big stuff, and
| lots of crazy stuff involved (seeing weird, unidentifiable living
| creatures quickly and blurrily cross in front of the ROV's
| camera, etc.).
|
| I remained hidden below water as a technical show diver, while
| 1800 to 2000 audience members topside were getting impatient with
| a "technical delay" show pause. Typically, we were checking for
| faults in safety systems on underwater lifts, or for a potential
| hydraulics leak. We'd exit under the audience seating and go back
| to work after clearing the issue.
|
| In a world filled with high-tech desk jobs, finance, and non-
| tangible products, and having grown up working class, I have
| great respect for all the people behind the scenes physically
| keeping our tenuous world together. Some of this became readily
| apparent with once invisible food delivery and restaurant workers
| during COVID. Healthcare workers obviously came into their own
| too, but so many other workers were still taken for granted.
|
| I visualize a person huffing when their internet is slow or
| intermittent with a guy out to sea working during a storm or
| under difficult conditions and I laugh at the juxtaposition and
| perspective of both. I also do rope work and had to resort to
| doing more of it during COVID because my 'desk work' dried up a
| bit. Hanging 300ft off of a building with a black balaclava and
| mask with all-black rigging equipment in NJ doing a facade
| inspection across from the FBI building was certainly a memorable
| one. (Note: all-black equipment is standard for theater and
| entertainment work to stay hidden. I did confirm the FBI building
| people were informed there would be 4 guys on ropes that day. You
| never know!). I have been programming since 1978, but I have
| always had to have some physicality to my work in order to be
| satisfied. I guess it's having a more tangible connection to the
| world not abstracted away several layers.
| pimlottc wrote:
| What sort of shows were these that you worked on as a technical
| diver? Is this a Seaworld-type of situation? But not sure why
| they would need underwater lifts.
| eiginn wrote:
| O by Cirque du Soleil has underwater lifts not sure about
| other shows
| eggy wrote:
| The House of Dancing Water in Macau. There is O at Bellagio,
| LV, NV, Le Reve closed at Wynn Las Vegas, The House of
| Dancing Water, Macau (where I worked), and there's another
| one in Wuhan, China (yes, Wuhan). The lifts had 8m hydraulic
| actuators to allow them to go down 7m and rise above pool
| level +1m. There were 11 stage lifts. The high-dive act was
| from 24m up. 17m liters of water.
|
| Here's a video during construction:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35WJDSoA8Ag&t=13s
|
| And you can check YouTube out for more of the motorcycle act,
| Russian Swings, high-dive, and other acts.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > I have always had to have some physicality to my work in
| order to be satisfied
|
| This also describes me pretty well. I was trained as a merchant
| ship's deck officer but opted to not go to sea as a career.
| Instead, I've spent my career building embedded systems. Every
| so often, I build a desktop app or a web application, but it
| lacks the satisfaction of being able to touch the hardware and
| actually watch my code affect something in the physical world.
| nojvek wrote:
| > affect something in the physical world.
|
| This is satisfying. Especially anything electromechanical.
|
| In a similar tangent, I believe social media isn't really
| social since you don't have people face to face talking to
| each other. The physical touch and facial expressions are
| quite important.
| eggy wrote:
| Even though I started programming in 1978 (Commodore PET
| 2001), I avoided doing full-time IT or software work. It's
| always been adjacent to my work - embedded systems, CNC
| machines, robotics, animatronics - but I lost any appetite
| for going all-in after being an assistant DBA full-time for
| a couple of years. Computers and programming were always
| tools for me to use for other purposes. Troubleshooting
| code or wiring on a 45-ton underwater lift and then moving
| it just has a great payoff for me. I was a pressure junkie
| too. The show would have a technical fault, and it meant I
| was either jumping into a wetsuit and gear for a dive, or I
| was in the basement in front of a cabinet with thousands of
| wires trying to isolate and fix the fault while the
| audience grew understandably frustrated. Fortunately, we
| honed the system and these happened less frequently, but I
| have to admit in hindsight it really got my juices flowing.
| eggy wrote:
| I am currently working on a control system from low-level,
| bare metal to high-level HMI/GUI for a cool, new hoist
| primarily for shows, but with applications in other
| industries. Shooting for high-integrity, safety-critical
| certifications above and beyond similar machines. I have been
| doing electromechanical stuff since the late 80s/early 90s.
| Hydraulic, pneumatic, electro-mechanical, air muscles, etc. I
| did animatronics (Christmas windows back in the day in NYC).
| Before Arduino, I went from purely relay logic circuits to
| the Parallax Basic Stamp in the 90s to Pic chips, to other
| 8-16-32-bit chips. I am, we are, looking for an Ada/SPARK2014
| software engineer/developer for this control system. Any
| HN'ers with SPARK2014 experience? I've reached out to AdaCore
| too. I have been a CNC and manual machinist (built my own CNC
| router table machine in 2002), welder, technical diver,
| industrial rope access tech (SPRAT certified). I am currently
| enamored with Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) as something more
| than mechatronics. I have been riding motorcycles since the
| 80s, but now the highly integrated software on motos is next
| level. My current bike (2021 KTM Duke 890R) has power
| throughout the gears/rpms and amazing ride modes with
| supermoto ABS settings, and I am looking at the new Ducati
| 698 Hypermotard. The Ducati's software uses inputs and
| inertial motion sensors are integrated to allow
| beginner/intermediate riders to more confidently wheelie or
| do supermoto slide outs of the rear tire. Human-Machine
| Interface taking on a whole new meaning without the cyborg
| trope.
| alistairjudson wrote:
| My Dad was an ROV technician for a brief period in the early
| 2000s, he got made redundant in early 2002 just after 9/11, and
| the dot com bubble bursting.
|
| On his last of the only two trips he made, he was based in Recife
| in northern Brazil. The ship was just there, on call, ready to
| respond to any breakages.
|
| My Mum, sister, and I were lucky enough to be flown out to Brazil
| for Christmas 2001, and it's something I'll never forget. I got
| to fuse bits of fibre-optic cable together under a microscope,
| drive an ROV about in the harbour a bit, and stand in some
| massive cable drums (all incredibly exciting for an eight year
| old child). It was the first time I went abroad, and the first
| time my Mum flew on a plane.
|
| It's amazing how much damage the dot com bubble bursting did to
| the industry, and the people who worked in it (I don't think my
| Dad ever really recovered from it). I believe until very recently
| there was so much fibre laid during the dot com boom, that we
| didn't really need to lay much more.
| ed_blackburn wrote:
| Hi, ex Nortel Networks employee here.
| zikduruqe wrote:
| I used to run them DMS switches. (Divorce Made Simple, or
| Days Midnights and Sundays)
| khuey wrote:
| > I believe until very recently there was so much fibre laid
| during the dot com boom, that we didn't really need to lay much
| more.
|
| My understanding is that there was a one-two punch of the dot
| com boom laying a huge amount of fiber followed by wave
| division multiplexing shortly afterwards massively increasing
| the capacity of existing fiber that resulted in an oversupply
| that lasted a decade or more.
| NortySpock wrote:
| Wave Division Multiplexing being substantially enabled by
| all-optical amplifiers in the late 1990's it seems, because
| otherwise you have to convert optical to electrical signal,
| amplifiy that, and reconvert that back into an optical signal
| in order to travel down the next length of fiber-optic.
|
| With optical amplifiers you can amplifiy every color of the
| rainbow at once, without breaking the chain.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_amplifier
| croisillon wrote:
| hi, i spent christmas 2001 in brazil too :)
| badbart14 wrote:
| Great read about a often overlooked part of global
| infrastructure. I personally liked the presentation style but get
| its not for everyone. Highly recommend the latest episode of the
| Vergecast where they talk more about the undersea cable world:
| https://youtu.be/bJnt87JgKMU
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| Nothing will compare to standing in a book store as a teen
| reading Mother Earth Mother Board, published in wired, while my
| Coke got warm.
|
| https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
| rob74 wrote:
| Right from the start, the tone of the presentation struck a wrong
| kind of chord with me. "The world's most important
| infrastructure"? Dear author, try living without electricity or
| fresh water for a few days, then I'll ask you again...
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| It's an interesting, well-written article written in good
| faith.
|
| I think small semantic issues like this should be ignored so we
| can enjoy worthwhile discussion.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I thought the same, but then, after a few pages, was this:
|
| > If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously
| break, modern civilization would cease to function. The
| financial system would immediately freeze. Currency trading
| would stop; stock exchanges would close. Banks and governments
| would be unable to move funds between countries because the
| Swift and US interbank systems both rely on submarine cables to
| settle over $10 trillion in transactions each day. In large
| swaths of the world, people would discover their credit cards
| no longer worked and ATMs would dispense no cash. As US Federal
| Reserve staff director Steve Malphrus said at a 2009 cable
| security conference, "When communications networks go down, the
| financial services sector does not grind to a halt. It snaps to
| a halt."
|
| > Corporations would lose the ability to coordinate overseas
| manufacturing and logistics. Seemingly local institutions would
| be paralyzed as outsourced accounting, personnel, and customer
| service departments went dark. Governments, which rely on the
| same cables as everyone else for the vast majority of their
| communications, would be largely cut off from their overseas
| outposts and each other. Satellites would not be able to pick
| up even half a percent of the traffic. Contemplating the
| prospect of a mass cable cut to the UK, then-MP Rishi Sunak
| concluded, "Short of nuclear or biological warfare, it is
| difficult to think of a threat that could be more justifiably
| described as existential."
|
| You could still argue with "the world's most important" claim,
| but this makes it clear that it is at least somewhat
| defensible.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| But that's rather overstating the case, isn't it? If all
| these cables simultaneously break, we'd switch to Starlink
| (at much lower total bandwidth), and international
| communication would drop in volume, with the most valuable
| uses winning.
|
| Millisecond-level currency trading would cease, but second-
| or minute-level trading would continue, and that would not
| dramatically destroy economies.
|
| ATMs of foreign banks might stop working; local banks should
| continue.
|
| Watching video from a foreign server would no longer be
| possible, but that's not the end of the world.
|
| And so on. It would slow many things down, some things would
| stop, but it wouldn't be the end of modern civilization.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > we'd switch to Starlink (at much lower total bandwidth)
|
| That's some kind of understatement, assuming that TFA is
| correct:
|
| > Satellites would not be able to pick up even half a
| percent of the traffic.
|
| I very much doubt that the trading systems that today rely
| on international data cables can be run via phones and
| voice communications, and I also wonder just how much of
| the phone system (even domestically within the USA)
| paradoxically relies in submarine cables.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > Satellites would not be able to pick up even half a
| percent of the traffic.
|
| So? How much of that traffic is video? If you eliminate
| that, what percentage of the rest can satellite pick up?
|
| I was not proposing that trading systems run via phones
| and voice. No, those are much less bandwidth-efficient
| than data. I was proposing that they continue to be run
| by data, just with lower frequency. (Will the global
| economy _really_ collapse without HFT on currencies?)
| billfor wrote:
| Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40071540
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Simple, but perhaps silly, question. If a fiber optic cable
| breaks underwater, the crew brings it up to the boat. But what if
| there is water contamination? Like if a fiber strand is broken or
| exposed, what's to prevent water particles entering the fiber?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| If you read the article, and didn't think to get a little more
| information the SS Great Eastern, mentioned early on as the first
| cable repair vessel, here you go:
|
| https://historicaldigression.com/2011/03/28/the-great-easter...
| renewiltord wrote:
| Not that quickly fixed. EAC has been out for months. But it is a
| cool industry.
| m463 wrote:
| Something about the look of that orange lifeboat makes me think
| back to my childhood, watching my share of japanese cartoons.
| nektro wrote:
| excellent article
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| The opening section, which felt like it was trying to build
| tension around the 2011 tsunami, seemed a bit weird to me. I
| thought tsunamis were only a problem close to shore or in
| relatively shallow water. The boat mentioned in the beginning was
| in _500 feet deep_ water, and indeed the article said the tsunami
| passed imperceptibly.
|
| Anyway, otherwise I thought this was an enjoyable read.
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