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Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

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Re: Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

#5
post #2

Would Russia/China not also suffer quite a bit while the US would hardly notice compared to Europe? It seems not as effective as people think as a way to hurt America? Before long everything would be able to run independently/with large breaks anyway.

They have their own more or less isolated segments of internet. Last week Russian agency regulating internet did a test in south areas and fully blocked the traffic to outside world so that telegram and VPNs were of no help

Re: Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

#6

It’s impossible to protect these cables so the only thing you can do is build in massive redundancy. Strategically it is probably cheaper to lay down many dozens of these cables in different locations than expect to protect them

But I assume layering cable is not a one time cost right? There should be some operation cost involved? Such as maintenance?

I am still hoping sometime we could have massive amount of hollow fibre undersea cable to reduce latency between different continents.

Re: Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

#8
post #5
post #2

Would Russia/China not also suffer quite a bit while the US would hardly notice compared to Europe? It seems not as effective as people think as a way to hurt America? Before long everything would be able to run independently/with large breaks anyway.

They have their own more or less isolated segments of internet. Last week Russian agency regulating internet did a test in south areas and fully blocked the traffic to outside world so that telegram and VPNs were of no help

I wonder what the backbone capacity of Starlink is.

Re: Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

#9
post #6

It’s impossible to protect these cables so the only thing you can do is build in massive redundancy. Strategically it is probably cheaper to lay down many dozens of these cables in different locations than expect to protect them

But I assume layering cable is not a one time cost right? There should be some operation cost involved? Such as maintenance? I am still hoping sometime we could have massive amount of hollow fibre undersea cable to reduce latency between different continents.

Operational costs (outside of repairing cuts) round to zero in comparison to the capital costs of laying the initial cable. There are OLD cables that are still active, despite relatively low bandwidth, because going and disconnecting everything on either end (even though the cable would remain there) is considered an additional unnecessary cost.

Re: Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

#10
post #8
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have their own more or less isolated segments of internet. Last week Russian agency regulating internet did a test in south areas and fully blocked the traffic to outside world so that telegram and VPNs were of no help

I wonder what the backbone capacity of Starlink is.

There is no way a Starlink connection has the bandwidth of fiber. It's not backbone material.
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