Undersea Cables Connect the Global Internet | Hacker News Reader

Undersea Cables Connect the Global Internet

nautil.us

72 pointsrbanffy28 comments

Here is the map for the curious: https://www.submarinecablemap.com

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...

> 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.

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/

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?

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.

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).

It's a great shame that our devices and operating systems don't support "connectionless" and intermediate-infrastructure-less https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network by default.

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

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)

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...

Reference quoted by news articles on the subject on how long it was estimated to take for the C-Lion1 to get repaired. However, you likely have a point, that the mid-Atlantic probably add some % to the on-site repair time and ++ on time to arrive. Much further away than Sweden to Lithuania.

Right, Baltic Sea has considerably shorter distances on average. I imagine weather conditions might change the equation, though, if you need to send icebreakers first to open up some dozens of kilometers of passage. Right now the sea is still open, except for the coastal areas in the very north.[1]

[1] https://en.ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/ice-conditions/

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.

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.

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.

EU Internet would be dominated by cookie banners, which I regard as an invasive species they exported to other continents.

I understand the US would be fine! Europe would struggle I think.

I think this website set a new record: Asking to share data with 1587 "partners"

Mother Earth Mother Board, from 1996, is a better article, but behind a paywall. https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

https://archive.ph/IPz22

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.

> 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?

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.

Only some of those electrons can move freely.

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

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...

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.

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