How the Internet Travels Across Oceans

I&#x27;ve rented some of these lines as part of a financial trading infrastructure.<p>What&#x27;s immediately obvious is the line is much faster than going over the public internet, and there&#x27;s no jitter: every time you ping it comes back in the same amount of time, whereas the internet pings will vary by several ms.<p>You also become acutely aware of cable breaks. Somehow this happens quite often under the English Channel. The network operator will start sending you emails that say<p>- Cable break detected<p>- Loading ship (can take ages)<p>- Found the break<p>- Patched it<p>- Back up<p>Occasionally bad weather would delay it.

I have a certain admiration and appreciation for this sort of thing, and every article that describes how the internet is physically interconnected.<p>Having seen internet connectivity in India slowly grow from only satellite-based connectivity, to having private internal interconnecting hubs within the country for bandwidth providers and ISPs to reduce latency, then news of every new submarine line improving bandwidth and latency, thereby reducing pricing. Going from getting 135ms - 200ms via dialup locally, to getting 60ms to Singapore and Hong Kong while playing Counter Strike and Quake 3. It was such a high!<p>Each development was so critical and it brought me great joy, and excitement. Still does!

If anyone is interested in a really well written travel essay about how one of those cables was installed in the 90s, this one never seems to get old: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;1996&#x2F;12&#x2F;ffglass&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;1996&#x2F;12&#x2F;ffglass&#x2F;</a>

This is perfect.<p>Can&#x27;t tell you the number of times I&#x27;ve had someone insist that the internet was on satellites.<p>Using terms like &quot;the cloud&quot; and with everything bring wireless definitely doesnt help with people&#x27;s misconceptions.<p>Even after I carefully explain that the internet uses under sea cables and generally either buried wires or above ground stuff I get dubious looks they say &quot;yeah, right. You&#x27;re probably just confused...&quot;

I’ve blown a few minds explaining that the Internet is delivered via light, sent through very long fiber optic cables under the sea.<p>I thought this was common knowledge until the first time I explained it, and the disbelief... Everyone had a revelation that day.<p>I always knew about fiber optics, growing up with dial up and dreaming of one day having a fiber connection. But I guess now that everyone is focused on mobile that piece of infrastructure is abstracted from even reasonably tech savvy people.

&gt;Inside the ship, workers spool the cable into cavernous tanks. One person walks the cable swiftly in a circle, as if laying out a massive garden hose, while others lie down to hold it in place to ensure it doesn’t snag or knot. Even with teams working around the clock, it takes about four weeks before the ship is loaded up with enough cable to hit the open sea.<p>How is that not automated? I cant believe that companies would rely on humans doing a boring and repetitive task without error for weeks on end when a single error could cause double digit percentage of time at port. Is this is just such an uncommon task that automating this wasnt worth the time saved at port?<p>edit: Even in the picture in the article you can see a single worker has removed their shoe covers that all the other employees are wearing[1]. Doesnt that degrade the cable right there?<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static01.nyt.com&#x2F;newsgraphics&#x2F;2019&#x2F;02&#x2F;15&#x2F;undersea-cables&#x2F;assets&#x2F;images&#x2F;lying-down-2000.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static01.nyt.com&#x2F;newsgraphics&#x2F;2019&#x2F;02&#x2F;15&#x2F;undersea-ca...</a>

This is so neat! Few questions though, if anyone can answer:<p>1) The cable still looks pretty thin, is it being housed in some sort of protective layer&#x2F;tube before it is laid? Seems like an anchor snag could easily break that line. If that happens, is it possible to &#x27;patch&#x27; a fiber cable?<p>2) Once it nears the coast, how deep is the line being buried?<p>3) This may be a dumb question (I&#x27;m no engineer), but does the light travel from the source all the way to end without any &quot;relay&quot; mechanism?<p>4) How much bandwidth can travel through one of these lines?

I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s right to say data is in the ocean though. They are stored in datacenters on land. And they travel through the ocean. Unless when we start putting more of these datacenters in the ocean like how some company has been experimenting with.

Aside: Is it just me, or do others find animated charts annoying? It takes me time to understand what&#x27;s being shown, and before the realization has sunk in, the graphic restarts causing the whole mental process to restart. Rather like a strobe light.

Related map of submarine cables on the globe (with clickable links for the cables): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.submarinecablemap.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.submarinecablemap.com</a>

Would anyone kindly name a major company that install these mammoth cables underneath oceans?<p>Surely they should be huge in valuation yet hidden away from the public glare.

&gt; The ship will carry enough supplies to last at least 60 days: roughly 200 loaves of bread...<p>Unless Jesus is one of the crew members, that isn&#x27;t nearly enough.

When I went to Fiji a few years back I was astounded by the quality of the internet considering we were in a remote part of the South Pacific. Turns out Fiji is a &quot;layover&quot; for all the underground cables coming from the US West coast to Australia...

Nice visualization at the intro on desktop+. I wonder if Rich Harris and his team were behind it? See recent changelog podcast featuring Rich Harris on being &#x27;a javascript journalist&#x27;[0]. Harris is author of the &#x27;magical disappearing UI framework&#x27;, svelte[1].<p>[0]<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;changelog.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;332" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;changelog.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;332</a> [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;svelte.technology&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;svelte.technology&#x2F;</a>

Old but good article by Neal Stephenson<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;1996&#x2F;12&#x2F;ffglass" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;1996&#x2F;12&#x2F;ffglass</a>

Interesting stuff. Just as important to education as &quot;how to make a car&quot; was 50 years ago.<p>Things not covered in this article: Expected carrying capacity? How much dark fiber (initially unused capacity)? How much extra cable is required to make sure it stays on the bottom even when going over oceanic mountain ranges? How much of the ocean-floor survey data is open, how much is proprietary, and how much is (military-style) secret?<p>Is there any sabotage? Do nav charts warn about these things?

&gt; Last year, Australia stepped in to block the Chinese technology giant Huawei from building a cable connecting Australia to the Solomon Islands, for fear it would give the Chinese government an entry point into its networks.<p>I don&#x27;t really understand this move. Surely the way that the Internet is designed, you can connect any network to any network. Why would this be any different with a physical cable in terms of security?

Related: Arthur C Clarke has a very interesting non-fiction book about the early days of submarine cables. &quot;Voice across the sea&quot;.

How the Governments Physically Look at the Internet that Travels Across Oceans. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nationalinterest.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;buzz&#x2F;russian-spy-submarines-are-tampering-undersea-cables-make-internet-work-should-we-be" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nationalinterest.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;buzz&#x2F;russian-spy-submarine...</a>

Might wanna read this as well: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;information-technology&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;how-the-internet-works-submarine-cables-data-centres-last-mile&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;information-technology&#x2F;2016&#x2F;05&#x2F;how-t...</a>

Interestingly I was just thinking about this the other day, and hoping that someone here would have the answer. I&#x27;m really curious what is the total bandwidth per second across different continently globally without accounting for intra-continent bandwidth?

Someone who wants to learn about the internet. Check out the KhanAcademy one <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.khanacademy.org&#x2F;computing&#x2F;computer-science&#x2F;internet-intro#internet-works-intro" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.khanacademy.org&#x2F;computing&#x2F;computer-science&#x2F;inter...</a>

I read this somewhere that Russia was tying to snoop on US by attaching these cables with electronic surveillance equipments.<p>IIRC military and defect corps have separate cables installed for themselves, and the Russian’s were trying to read the signals.<p>Would someone tell more about it or add the Wikipedia page here please?

Didn&#x27;t realize Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple outright own some of those cables.

What I find fascinating is that they also have many repeaters given the massive distances covered by these cables so they need to provide electricity through the cables on such long distances.

This is exactly the reason why I like DigitalOcean name so much.

I remember discovering them when I was young and thinking how mundane it is. I also thought that satellites are a integral part of the internet just like the TV network.

What happens when they reach the edges of tectonic plates (like in the middle of the Atlantic)? I&#x27;d imagine the heat would melt the cables quite easily.

The graph showing the shift of undersea cable shares from public internet backbone to private companies is concerning.

I always wondered if there are not problems in the spot a new cable is laid to cross an older cable.

Can someone just dive and cut cables?

&gt; Lasers propel data down the threads at nearly the speed of light<p>This is funny. Why “nearly”?

The first undersea cable was laid in 1858 and what&#x27;s funny is the two guys on either end couldn&#x27;t agree on voltages and currents etc. and would destroy each other&#x27;s equipment. It seems silly until you remember that the only way they could communicate is via post, which took 7 days, or the very cable they were working on.