We've gotten very used to a world of wireless electronics,
but did you know that most of the global internet
still depends on running cables
over really, really long distances?
There are so many undersea internet cables
sitting on the ocean floor
that the map of them kind of looks like a plate of spaghetti,
whether you're looking off the Cape of Good Hope
or off the northern coast of Russia,
where there's a cable that's aptly called the Polar Express.
And it turns out that undersea communications cables
aren't even anything new.
In fact, the first commercial cable was laid
all the way back in 1850, connecting England and France.
Though, of course, that cable was intended for Telegraph,
as they weren't exactly discussing
Victorian affairs of state over Twitter.
Now, unfortunately, some fishers actually cut that cable
a few short weeks later, but you can't stop progress,
and more submarine cables started popping up,
with the first transatlantic cable
becoming operational in 1858.
Though, it took around
two minutes to transmit just one character
between the continents.
Of course, it didn't stay that slow for long.
As our understanding of the way electricity works
over long distances increased,
we got to the point where we could carry full-on voice calls
under the ocean with copper coaxial cables by the 1950s.
Though, unsurprisingly, those don't provide
the necessary bandwidth to carry global internet traffic.
Enter fiber optic technology,
which powers every undersea cable
that's still operating.
Fiber optics work by converting information into light waves,
but because this light attenuates at distance,
similarly to how a flashlight becomes impossible to see
when you get far enough away from it,
repeaters need to be installed at intervals
along these cables to amplify the light
and ensure that it gets all the way down the pipe.
And although fiber at home is still a luxury for many,
undersea fiber started appearing in the late 80s.
Originally, it also mostly carried voice calls,
but now that fiber forms the backbone of the global internet.
Improvements in the materials
that we use to construct these cables
have resulted in them getting literally
a million times faster since that time.
We've gone from the original TAT-8 cable
carrying 280 megabits per second
to the new Grace Hopper cable laid in September, 2021,
carrying 352 terabits per second.
That is over 350,000 times faster
than the old home gigabit connection.
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Now, the question is,
how do we keep undersea cables from failing all the time?
I mean,
undersea floor is a far cry
from the secured climate-controlled data centers
that we're used to thinking of
when we hear the words internet infrastructure.
Well, the cables are wrapped up
and insulated quite securely against any number of hazards.
At the very center of the cable are the optical fibers
that carry the actual data
and copper tubing that provides power.
These guts of the cable are wrapped up in plastic
and aluminum to prevent water ingress.
But the cable still needs to be toughened up
to withstand other physical damage,
physical hazards.
Nylon and tar can provide additional protection,
and thick steel wires serve as armor
against fishing boats, anchors,
and even the occasional shark bite.
And yes, sharks have been observed nibbling on these cables
every now and then.
But that doesn't make the cables invincible.
They do still sustain damage
and even break completely sometimes,
causing slowdowns like we saw in South Africa in 2020.
Fortunately, the internet works in such a way
that data can simply
take another route to its destination
while the cable is being fixed,
which typically involves a repair ship
dragging the two broken ends of the cable
up from the sea floor and splicing them back together.
But hold on a second.
With all the satellites
that we have floating around in space
and services like Starlink being released,
are these cables in danger of being replaced
by wireless solutions?
Not anytime soon.
Even though wireless data transfer over distances
is much better than it used to be,
cables are still much faster, much lower latency,
and way cheaper.
It's kind of like Ethernet versus Wi-Fi,
but on a way larger scale.
In fact, several of the fastest cables
aren't even owned by old school telecom companies.
They were instead laid by newer companies
like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook
to improve efficiency in their cloud data centers.
So the undersea cables look like they're here to stay,
at least until the fish that we eat
learn to use garden shears and exact revenge on all of us.
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