According to the authoritative submarine cable map website. There are currently 493 active or actively under-construction sub-sea internet cables crisscrossing the globe.
These range from the relatively modest 300-kilometer Azerbaijan to Turkmenistan wire running under the Black Sea to the absolutely gargantuan 6600-kilometer Maria cable linking Virginia Beach in the US with Bill Bow in northern Spain. Maria weighs the same as 24 blue whales. It’s apparently the firm’s laying down this serpentine superhighway worldwide; there are now 1.5 million kilometers of undersea data wires worldwide.
Arcadey about how much it all costs but professional estimates indicate a typical transoceanic cable should set you back between three and four hundred million dollars which seems like a lot because they’re not especially thick typically around the girth of a garden hose.
That includes layers of protective thixotropic jelly around the all-important fiber optic core-plus. Multiple plastic sheaths and copper wiring to power the thing but even so on average. They can ferry an awesome 100 gigabytes per second in data with newer and forthcoming cables able to transmit 400 gigabytes per second so how does so much data fit down such slim channels?
Dense wavelength division multiplexing, a highly sophisticated data-wrangling method, may provide at least some of the solution. Put simply, dense wavelength division multiplexing. Lets data providers use more than one wavelength of light to convey information fiber optically. Several, wavelengths are employed. Simultaneously and stacked, creating astonishing data speeds.
Internet cable connecting wires
This happens at buzzing data center-like landing sites at either end of the cable. These are the cables just straightforward long wires not quite every 70 to 100 kilometers. These essentially serve as amplifiers keeping the signal strength up to par over long distances. Moreover, that’s why the cables incorporate copper conductors, by the way, carrying up to 10 000 volts of dc to power the repeaters. How are the cables late? They’re first coiled into vast cylindrical drums on specialized cable-laying ships. As much as a year’s planning and charting will go into plotting the perfect trans-oceanic route.
Volcanic areas and areas where the cable is spooled out the back of the ship are both bad places for undersea internet connections. At a sedate pace of around 10 kilometers an hour. If the ship encounters bad weather, the captain can decide whether to break off the cord, tie it to a boy and retreat to karma waters. When the storm passes, the ship returns to the boy and picks up where it left off. Moreover, accidents and outages on the cables can and do occur. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy in the U.S. knocked out several key transatlantic cables, disrupting networks for hours.
Japan Discovery
In 2011, the Fukushima earthquake in Japan caused similar disruptions. The vast majority of such disruptions. However, are the result of human carelessness. Trawler nets, wayward ship anchors, and cables situated close to the shore are significantly more at risk from such disruption. As such, the nearer you get to a lander cable. The more carefully armor-plated it will be. The seafloor is mined using ship-drawn ploughs.
Awesomely, sharks have been spotted nibbling on one of Google’s Get your teeth into this 2014 clip, more sinister even than that the US government has consistently warned of interference in the cables from hostile foreign powers like Russia.
Global country’s Interference towards fiber Optic cables
The US government should know all about what whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in 2013. How the NSA eavesdropped on fiber-optic communications and the geopolitical implications of Undersea cables were also fascinating last year. Australia The government intervened to prevent this.
The Chinese technology giant, Huawei, is installing an internet cable connecting Australia with the Solomon Islands
The fear is that China could use the link to gain access to
Australia’s sensitive internal So who owns these cables? That’s an interesting question. it’s an expensive business.
Origin of Fiber optical cable
So, historically, nations or quasi-national telecom providers have picked up the bill of the world’s
America remains the biggest owner of cables.
With a stake in some 230 000 kilometers of undersea cable, the
China Telecom: Frequently, cables are owned by groups or consortia.
It consists of up to 50 separate owners, including tech firms, local government agencies, and other businesses. And while this model helps spread the initial cost, it’s less helpful when something goes wrong.
increasingly big tech and nobody can agree who has to put on a wetsuit and do something about it. So far, over the past few years, the overwhelming majority of investment in undersea cable infrastructure has come from companies like Facebook, which currently owns nearly 100 000 kilometers of cables; Google owns roughly the same amount. Although, Amazon has its own massive private network, hooking up the online giant’s mighty data centers through cables traversing the Atlantic and Pacific.
The Indian Ocean plus The tech giants like to frame these vast, environmentally disruptive infrastructure projects as a civilization-enhancing largesse on their part, but they’re also shareholder companies, remember, and they know perfectly well that increasing the number of human beings online is the only way they can continue to grow. Hang on a second. You’re probably thinking, “What about Star Link? Isn’t our old mate?”
Elon Musk about the Internet
For now, the cable is by far the cheapest and most efficient means of eating vast packets of data over incredibly long distances, even if normally bullish Musk says Starlink is only aimed at people who don’t presently enjoy access to high-speed fiber, but who knows how that’ll pan out in a decade or two? For now, the future is very much undersea cables.
This summer, Google and Facebook announced a joint initiative to build an undersea cable named “apricot” that will link up Singapore, Japan, Guam, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Indonesia by the year 2024. A group led by Facebook has just provided funding for the longest subaquatic cable ever a 45 000 km (cost of it $1 billion) behemoth called “to Africa” that would connect 33 countries.
