You may not realise it, but you spend most of your day travelling back and forth across the ocean floor at the speed of light. Every time you tweeted about water charges, liked a Facebook page because your boss shared it with you, even when you clicked on the link to see those Kim Kardashian photos (don’t lie): you were unwittingly zipping underneath the Atlantic like Jacques Cousteau on mephedrone. You see, most of the internet is underwater.
Yes, shiny orbiting satellites are very impressive, but if you think about it, sending a photo on snapchat to someone in New York via a 35,000km detour in space is probably not the most efficient way of flirting. No, if you want to reliably and cheaply send communications from one landmass to another, you’ve got to go submarine.
Pop quiz hotshot: take a guess how many cables it takes to hold the internet together?
Not even close. Incredibly, the answer is just 263.
263 cables running along the ocean bed connects every single person to every single computer on the web, carrying 99% of all international traffic. That’s insane, especially when you consider that Cisco claims that every second, nearly a million minutes of video content will cross the web by 2018. The only continent that underwater internet can’t reach is the Antarctic. It’s too cold, the ice is unpredictable and it all sounds like too much hard work. This is why you don’t see many funny penguin videos on the internet.
To cope with all of this traffic, high-speed communications cables contain bunches of fibre optic cables that use light switches at either side to transmit data instantly from point A to point B. The inside of the cable is made of extraordinarily pure glass and the light simply bounces off the inside to get from one end to the other. “It’s an ingenious invention,” says Darren O’Donohoe, network engineering director with Magnet Ireland, provider of Voice, Broadband and Hosting cloud services with a declared mission “to take Irish Business to the Cloud” one of the few companies that have their own international fibre network provided through sister company Hibernia.
Current technology allows transfer of hundreds of gigabits per second through a strand no thicker than the width of a human hair. While the technology is cutting edge, the idea of fibre optics isn’t new. Way back in 1854, Carlow local John Tyndall proved that light can be bent by shining it through a curved stream of water. But it was only by the mid-20th century that physicists figured out how to transmit light through glass effectively. Top secret technology at the time, it was through fibre optic technology that we got such great pictures of the moon landing in 1969. If you believe that actually happened, of course.
Laying these cables is no picnic. It’s a tedious, slow and expensive job done by special laying boats. However, you can’t just dump a cable into the ocean and hope for the best. Sea mapping, ecological surveys, avoiding wrecks and corals and plain old manpower means that just to get going, you’d be looking at dropping a few hundred million euro. That’s all well and good, until it breaks on you.
One of the cables that links Japan and America reaches 8,000 metres below sea level at its lowest point. That’s as deep as Mount Everest is tall. When the cable breaks, you first have to use a meter to send light pulses down to figure out where the break happened. Then you send down remote controlled robots or ROVs that can snip off the bad bits and then bring the two ends up to the surface to stick together again. Note: masking tape is not a good option here. “Redundancy is key,” says O’Donohoe. “We actually had one of our cables severed recently, but because of smart routing and our figure of eight network that links Dublin to Belfast to New York, our users didn’t notice a thing.”
There are more than a few threats to submarine cables. First, there’s the underwater equivalent to the clumsy JCB driver who knocks down the telephone post. Only a couple of years ago a considerable chunk of Africa was left without any access to the internet when a ship’s anchor accidentally snipped a cable as the boat entered the port of Mombassa in Kenya.
Then there are spies. The Soviets were found to be snooping 20,000 leagues under the sea back in the Cold War. More recently, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that both the UK and the US have been tapping the ‘backbone of the internet’. Thirdly, there have been a handful of dedicated cyber terrorists like the three cheeky chaps who managed to sever Egypt’s link to the outside world for a number of weeks.
Finally, there is the issue of sharks. For some reason, it appears sharks love the taste of the internet and have actually been videotaped by ROVs chomping down on submarine cables like they were the succulent limbs of a casual surfer. This even prompted Google to upgrade their casing to include a layer of kevlar, the same material they use in military armour. The thinking is that sharks are reacting to the electrical current which triggers some sort of reflex, but right now, that’s just a theory. What we do know for sure is that sharks are smart, deadly and are trying to take out our communications. But there’s probably no need to panic.
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Production of this article was supported by Magnet. You can find out what Magnet can do for your business by visiting www.magnet.ie
