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New Royal Navy ship to protect 'critical' undersea cables

bbc.co.uk

1–10 of 12 posts

Re: New Royal Navy ship to protect 'critical' undersea cables

#2
I read this and was worried until I pondered if critical communication was still reliant on undersea cables. A threat to the economic system is obviously an important factor.

I am no expert but I would hope that satellites are now used for defence based communication.

Re: New Royal Navy ship to protect 'critical' undersea cables

#3

I read this and was worried until I pondered if critical communication was still reliant on undersea cables. A threat to the economic system is obviously an important factor. I am no expert but I would hope that satellites are now used for defence based communication.

The bandwidth available via undersea fiber optic cables is orders of magnitude higher than via satellite. I'm sure governments have backup satellite links but their use would be restricted to top priority traffic if something catastrophic happened to the undersea cables.

Re: New Royal Navy ship to protect 'critical' undersea cables

#6
post #5

Somebody in the Washington Post once quote a phrase from a sailor's prayer: "O, Lord, my ship is so small and thy ocean so large." How many thousands of miles of cable, in how many hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean?

That was my first thought: Just one?

I suppose having a working POC is also a good idea if they need to scale up more of them to protect/regularly repair the cables.

Re: New Royal Navy ship to protect 'critical' undersea cables

#9

I read this and was worried until I pondered if critical communication was still reliant on undersea cables. A threat to the economic system is obviously an important factor. I am no expert but I would hope that satellites are now used for defence based communication.

> I am no expert but I would hope that satellites are now used for defence based communication.

If a war gets to the point where nation states are cutting each other’s undersea cables, I think satellites are coming down too

Re: New Royal Navy ship to protect 'critical' undersea cables

#10

I read this and was worried until I pondered if critical communication was still reliant on undersea cables. A threat to the economic system is obviously an important factor. I am no expert but I would hope that satellites are now used for defence based communication.

> I am no expert but I would hope that satellites are now used for defence based communication. If a war gets to the point where nation states are cutting each other’s undersea cables, I think satellites are coming down too

From at least the 1890s it was common for belligerents to cut one another's telegraph cables. Of course, there weren't any satellites back then.
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