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The undersea cables actually connecting the entire internet. Sometimes sharks just take a bite of them, they're reasonable well protected but it's enough damage
by rtkwe 7mo ago
The undersea cables actually connecting the entire internet. Sometimes sharks just take a bite of them, they're reasonable well protected but it's enough damage to cause outages and disruptions.
It's the single pin under everything because there are a limited number of those cables especially in some regions so a single shark can take out the entire internet for some countries.
http://www.mirceakademy.com/uploads/MSA2024-6-6.pdf http://www.mirceakademy.com/uploads/MSA2024-6-6.pdf
- Hamuko 7mo agoI feel like having them as a single brick is a bit hyperbolic, since undersea cables are pretty redundant in most of the world. Get rid of one and traffic just routes around it. Ships have been routinely destroying cables in the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea in the past couple of years without causing significant disruptions.
- huflungdung 7mo ago[dead]
- drob518 7mo agoThe whole Internet was designed for precisely this use case. If there is an outage, the distributed system will try to find another path. No actual central point of failure. As you say, the single brick is hyperbolic. But yea, those sharks can certainly be disruptive at times.
- rezonant 7mo agoWell that depends on how much traffic that cable was supporting, how much free capacity is available on other cables heading to the same area, how much additional latency the rerouting will add and how sensitive to latency the rerouted traffic is doesn't it?
- rtkwe 7mo agoOnly mildly. There's not huge amounts of dark capacity just sitting around waiting to take over so if a major fiber connection goes down the remainder will get congested with the extra capacity. It won't cascade like a power outage but the remaining lines will slow down.
- dijit 7mo ago"most of the world" is doing a seriously large amount of heavy lifting in this sentence. There are many regions that are served by a single line, more than you think. Even "well connected" places have fewer cables than you expect, and the frustrating thing is that you don't know that you can route around an issue until you try. BGP is really resilient, which is great, but if your path is not clear then you'll only realise it when the failover doesn't happen, you'll think there's a redundant path.
- zahlman 7mo agoDo satellite networks not move the needle in terms of capacity/reliability now?
- rtkwe 7mo agoNo. They're not setup to be a principal route between two nations and most satellite networks until very recently didn't even route messages through other satellites but instead retransmitted them to a ground station with access to hardline internet. Even Starlink mostly does this still because it's way cheaper and easier.
- rtkwe 7mo agoYou can see an unofficial tracker [0] of the Starlink downlink network and see how outside of some rural areas your data is only moving a few tens of miles away most of the time before it's sent down to a ground system. Their sats have 3 200 Gbps laser communicators for intra constellation routing which is pretty small for the task of replacing fiber optic links. [0] https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1805q6rlePY4WZd8QMOaNe2BqAgFkYBY&hl=en_US&ll=43.23573915359288%2C-74.79099670702867&z=4 https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1805q6rlePY4WZd8QMO...
- roughly 7mo agoI never understand why questions like this get downvoted around here.