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
a 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 is still operating.
Fiber optics work by converting information into light waves, but because this light attenuates
a 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 a normal home gigabit connection.
The question is, how do we keep undersea cables from failing all the time?
The seafloor is a far cry from the secured climate-controlled data centers that we're
used to thinking of when we hear the word internet infrastructure.
While 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 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 seafloor 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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