It’s well worth visiting the Museum of Global Communications at Porthcurno in Cornwall UK which has displays showing the history of submarine cable-laying ships and telegraphy equipment. Porthcurno beach is where the early cables came ashore in the UK and there is a hut on the beach where you can see them. Connecting all those cables, both the subsea and overland ones are routers which, if say a subsea cable between the UK and the USA breaks, will automatically re-route internet traffic to an alternative route (cable) between the UK and the USA. There are several transatlantic cables providing alternative routes, and they have spare capacity. No so in the Tonga example – one island, one cable, one route.
Some data centres aggregate colossal amounts of international internet traffic, using many thousands of routers, thus the standby diesel generators in case they lose utility power – 60 Hudson Street (New York) and Telehouse (London) are prime examples of data centres that, if they went offline, we would notice.
Data centres are not environmentally friendly, 50% of several megawatts of power to run the equipment turning to heat and the other 50% to cool things down (the efficiency ratio can vary). Iceland is a nice place for data centres, green geo-thermal power for the equipment and open the windows (sort of) to cool it down. Iceland is connected by 4 subsea cables – 3 to Europe and 1 to North America. Green electricity will hopefully make data centres less environmentally unfriendly over time but may take years. Given that the computing used to generate cryptocurrency (aka mining) uses massive amounts of electricity this can’t come soon enough. Cryptocurrency mining is estimated to consume between 120 and 240 billion kilowatt-hours per year, a range that exceeds the total annual electricity usage of many individual countries, such as Argentina or Australia.
I had absolutely NO idea!! If I had actually ever thought about where the internet was located I would not have guessed in primitive undersea cables that are pretty much unprotected. Now I know about one more whopping huge thing that makes us vulnerable. I know that this information is important for (some of) us to know, but I personally just want to bury my head in the sand and hope that better minds are working on it. Thanks?
Thanks, that was very informative. I live in Nova Scotia which used to be a major landing site for transatlantic cables, back in the days when I assume cable operators were trying to minimize distance under water. You can still see ruins of abandoned cable landing sites in the middle of nowhere. As for the future, undersea cables are being looked at for monitoring what is going on in the deep ocean, including deep currents and advance detection of tsunamis. Folks in Europe for example should care because the ocean carries an awful lot of heat and shifts in how that heat moves could ruin the football season over there. As you can imagine, monitoring the deep ocean is very difficult and expensive. Instrumenting cables could cover a lot more ocean at lower cost.
It’s well worth visiting the Museum of Global Communications at Porthcurno in Cornwall UK which has displays showing the history of submarine cable-laying ships and telegraphy equipment. Porthcurno beach is where the early cables came ashore in the UK and there is a hut on the beach where you can see them. Connecting all those cables, both the subsea and overland ones are routers which, if say a subsea cable between the UK and the USA breaks, will automatically re-route internet traffic to an alternative route (cable) between the UK and the USA. There are several transatlantic cables providing alternative routes, and they have spare capacity. No so in the Tonga example – one island, one cable, one route.
Some data centres aggregate colossal amounts of international internet traffic, using many thousands of routers, thus the standby diesel generators in case they lose utility power – 60 Hudson Street (New York) and Telehouse (London) are prime examples of data centres that, if they went offline, we would notice.
Data centres are not environmentally friendly, 50% of several megawatts of power to run the equipment turning to heat and the other 50% to cool things down (the efficiency ratio can vary). Iceland is a nice place for data centres, green geo-thermal power for the equipment and open the windows (sort of) to cool it down. Iceland is connected by 4 subsea cables – 3 to Europe and 1 to North America. Green electricity will hopefully make data centres less environmentally unfriendly over time but may take years. Given that the computing used to generate cryptocurrency (aka mining) uses massive amounts of electricity this can’t come soon enough. Cryptocurrency mining is estimated to consume between 120 and 240 billion kilowatt-hours per year, a range that exceeds the total annual electricity usage of many individual countries, such as Argentina or Australia.
I had absolutely NO idea!! If I had actually ever thought about where the internet was located I would not have guessed in primitive undersea cables that are pretty much unprotected. Now I know about one more whopping huge thing that makes us vulnerable. I know that this information is important for (some of) us to know, but I personally just want to bury my head in the sand and hope that better minds are working on it. Thanks?
Thanks, that was very informative. I live in Nova Scotia which used to be a major landing site for transatlantic cables, back in the days when I assume cable operators were trying to minimize distance under water. You can still see ruins of abandoned cable landing sites in the middle of nowhere. As for the future, undersea cables are being looked at for monitoring what is going on in the deep ocean, including deep currents and advance detection of tsunamis. Folks in Europe for example should care because the ocean carries an awful lot of heat and shifts in how that heat moves could ruin the football season over there. As you can imagine, monitoring the deep ocean is very difficult and expensive. Instrumenting cables could cover a lot more ocean at lower cost.