[HN Gopher] Undersea Cables Connect the Global Internet
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Undersea Cables Connect the Global Internet
Author : rbanffy
Score : 51 points
Date : 2024-11-18 15:53 UTC (6 days ago)
(HTM) web link (nautil.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (nautil.us)
| khuey wrote:
| As always, Neal Stephenson's Mother Earth Mother Board from 1996
| is the must-read classic of this subject.
|
| https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
| cj wrote:
| Definitely an interesting writing style. Wasn't expecting to
| learn that the internet "weighs" about as much as an apple.
|
| The amount of analogies/comparisons used in this article is
| incredible. I almost think it would be easier for the average
| non-tech reader to understand if they compared it to something
| more directly relatable, like the power lines that deliver
| electricity to your house.
|
| I wonder how much "weight" of electricity I consume per year.
| dataflow wrote:
| > Wasn't expecting to learn that the internet "weighs" about as
| much as an apple.
|
| Something doesn't make sense here. An electron is 1/2000th the
| mass of a proton. So 1/2000th of the mass of your hard disk is
| its electrons. So they're saying the entire internet runs on
| thousands of hard disks? That seems off by several orders of
| magnitude... what are they measuring?
| Gare wrote:
| Only some of those electrons can move freely.
| K0HAX wrote:
| The following are all based on assumptions I'm making.
|
| The type of people who are likely to make analogies for how
| much the internet might weigh are almost certainly not
| physicists. They're probably smart, and they're probably used
| to doing math (programmers), but they might miss details that
| career physicists would think are obvious.
| voxadam wrote:
| Is it just me or does this page render improperly in Firefox
| while appearing correct on Chrome. Interestingly, the homepage
| looks correct in both browsers but the layout for the story pages
| are wonky in Firefox.
|
| -
|
| Firefox 132.0.1 (64-bit)
|
| Chrome 131.0.6778.85 (Official Build) (64-bit)
|
| Fedora 41, KDE Plasma 6.2.3, AMD64
| diggan wrote:
| Using 132.0.2 (64-bit) on Arch Linux and I think the layout and
| everything else is rendering perfectly fine? Try disabling
| addons/extensions and/or use a private window, sometimes
| removal of ads can shift things around.
| AzzyHN wrote:
| No issues here on Firefox 128.4.0esr, even with uBlock Origin
| medium mode[1] blocking 31% of the page.
|
| [1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-
| mode:-medium...
| unsolved73 wrote:
| Here is the map for the curious:
| https://www.submarinecablemap.com
| araes wrote:
| Thank you for providing the reference.
|
| That was my exact complaint on reading the article. "Seriously,
| you went through that entire article, and never gave people the
| ability to personally explore the cable connections themselves?
| Shame."
|
| Also, bonus content from recent news. The two cables cut are:
|
| [1] (C-Lion1, Finland-Germany, this got referenced a bunch)
| https://www.submarinecablemap.com/submarine-cable/c-lion1
|
| [2] (BCS East-West Interlink, Lithuania-Sweden, kinda difficult
| to find) https://www.submarinecablemap.com/submarine-cable/bcs-
| east-w...
| AzzyHN wrote:
| > The telecommunications analytics agency TeleGeography
| maintains an addictive map of all the world's undersea
| cables[...]
|
| They weren't kidding, it is addictive! I'm surprised that zero
| undersea cables connect directly to the SF Bay Area, and how
| many cables there are in the bay around Seattle/Vancouver.
|
| And the Far North Fiber connecting Norway, Ireland, Alaska
| (USA), and Japan, but none of the other countries it goes by on
| the way. I wonder why.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I wonder if we should design infrastructure that is resilient to
| cables being cut, I'm pretty certain everything would break right
| now if the Atlantic cables were cut. Does anyone know of an easy
| way to test this? Would cloudflare or AWS go down for example?
| What about my local bank?
| rogerrogerr wrote:
| I know of a way to test it...
|
| But realistically, I would think the US/Americas would be
| approximately fine. Most, if not practically all, services
| people on the NA continent use are based in the US from both a
| corporate and technical perspective. The command+control stuff
| for distributed systems is probably in the US.
|
| Across the pond(s), yeah, I'd expect more disruption.
| Swizec wrote:
| When I was in high school, our cable out of the country got
| cut on the border with Austria. For a few hours we could only
| access domestic websites, which was a pretty interesting
| experience.
|
| 20 years later I wonder how many of those are hosted on
| AWS/GCP/Azure and would break anyway. Probably all but the
| biggest.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| An interesting thought experiment is what would happen to
| each region's internet culture if cut off like this from
| one another? It would be like a speciation event like when
| animals get cut off from one another by continental drift
| etc.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I understand the US would be fine! Europe would struggle I
| think.
| yuliyp wrote:
| What kind of resiliency are you hoping to achieve? For most
| routes, there are many dozens of cables starting at many
| different locations and taking many distinct paths across the
| ocean. The companies using these cables take great pains to
| ensure redundancy for critical paths: they'll validate minimum
| distances between the cables, ensure that they have a variety
| of landing points, ensure that they have enough spare capacity
| to handle a certain number of cables all being out for repair
| simultaneously. Alternatives to cables would be either land-
| based wireless (radio, point-to-point microwave) or satellite,
| both of which have much lower throughput capabilities and also
| are vulnerable to sabotage of transmission/receiver locations.
|
| While the number of cables is not large enough to put it out of
| the reach of many nations, it's also something that no group
| with the capability of doing it would really want to do: it's a
| surefire way to invite retribution from basically the rest of
| the world, while not really achieving much militarily: armies
| almost invariably have their own communication systems
| (satellite, microwave, transoceanic fiber whose location is
| secret, etc).
| chgs wrote:
| We do have resiliency - the internet reroutes around these cuts
| l. Knock out every Atlantic cable and traffic from NY to London
| would route via LA and singapore.
|
| I see this all the time on traffic from far east to Europe when
| a Red Sea cable dies, and I've seen it from India to Europe too
| (and seen traffic rerouted via South Africa and up the west
| coast a fair bit)
|
| Latency is higher, but on the whole things continue to work.
| Until there's enough damage - problems tend to be if you cut
| enough that cables and the routers they are connected to start
| to bottleneck.
| araes wrote:
| Sure, which of the 24 Atlantic cables are you going to cut with
| their 5-15 day repair time estimates? Or maybe the 20+ routing
| the other way around the Earth. (See map linked above)
| taneliv wrote:
| Where do you get these repair time estimates? I couldn't find
| a good source, but for example [1] says that, yes, one to two
| weeks to repair, but two to three weeks to get the ship from
| Europe to West Africa.
|
| [1] https://www.channelstv.com/2024/03/16/internet-
| disruption-su...
| AzzyHN wrote:
| Hypothetically you could test this by forcing your connections
| to avoid certain data centers... how you would do this, I'm
| unsure. It's been a while since I've taken a course on it but I
| swear CompTIA Network+ covered this
| jdblair wrote:
| Mother Earth Mother Board, from 1996, is a better article, but
| behind a paywall. https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
| bcye wrote:
| I think this website set a new record: Asking to share data with
| 1587 "partners"
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