<
https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/features/the-secret-life-of-the-500-cables-that-run-the-internet/>
"The concert is in London. You're watching it live from your home in Atlanta.
What makes that possible is a network of subsea cables draped across the cold,
dark contours of the ocean floor, transmitting sights and sounds at the speed
of light through strands of glass fiber as thin as your hair but thousands of
miles long.
These cables, only about as thick as a garden hose, are high-tech marvels. The
fastest, the newly completed transatlantic cable called Amitié and funded by
Microsoft, Meta and others, can carry 400 terabits of data per second. That's
400,000 times faster than your home broadband if you're lucky enough to have
high-end gigabit service.
And yet subsea cables are low-tech, too, coated in tar and unspooled by ships
employing basically the same process used in the 1850s to lay the first
transatlantic telegraph cable. SubCom, a subsea-cable maker based in New
Jersey, evolved from a rope manufacturer with a factory next to a deep-water
port for easy loading onto ships.
Though satellite links are becoming more important with orbiting systems like
SpaceX's Starlink, subsea cables are the workhorses of global commerce and
communications, carrying more than 99% of traffic between continents.
TeleGeography, an analyst firm that tracks the business, knows of 552 existing
and planned subsea cables, and more are on the way as the internet spreads to
every part of the globe and every corner of our lives."
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-endometriosis-poverty-mexico-indigenous-canada/>
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
