Sunday, March 1, 2020

Internet access hangs by a thread for hundreds of millions



Sharks might not threaten our internet connection, but fishermen certainly do.Despite what Wi-Fi and mobile data might lead people to believe, the internet is less of a nebulus cloud of data in the air above us, and more of an intricate mesh of wires firing away beneath our feet.

The world’s online networks are powered by a complex system of underwater and underground cabling, supplemented in some regions by satellite links.

Around 380 undersea cables carry over 99.5% of all transoceanic data, running for 750,000 miles across the ocean floor. These fiber optic wires connect the massive data centers supporting cloud behemoths such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

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The total number of submarine cables shot up during a period of rapid growth in the mid-2000s, followed by an interval during which relatively little new cable was laid, but available capacity was slowly exhausted. A renewed demand for bandwidth, caused by the rapid growth of connected devices, is now propelling a new wave of cable initiatives.

The first submarine cable to use fiber optics was TAT-8, which went live in 1988. It had two operational fiber pairs and one backup pair, and reached speeds of up to 280MB per second.

The current fastest cable (MAREA, owned jointly by Microsoft and Facebook) has eight fibre pairs, and achieved record speeds of 26.2TB per second in 2019 – that's almost 100,000 times faster than TAT-8.

However, despite exponential growth in quantity and capacity, whole countries can be plunged into blackout if just one cable is damaged or snapped, with ramifications for household users and businesses alike.

Undersea cables are usually run through areas of deep ocean to minimize the possibility of damage. But the deep sea is a harsh environment, and cables laid at extreme depth can be challenging to access if repairs are required.

According to telecoms research firm Telegeography, there are over 100 cable breaks per year. Many of these go unnoticed in developed regions with extensive redundancies, but the infrastructure keeping us online is still far more fragile than any of us realize.

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