It’s a new development for online platforms to also be the owners (or co-owners) of the delivery infrastructure. To connect those data centers, they not only invest in existing cables, but also increasingly build their own cables to ensure that their services are quickly and readily available anywhere in the world. So companies like Facebook and Google began to build global networks of data centers. It’s in the ocean’, New York Times, 2019įor videos to play and links to open milliseconds after a click, with minimal latency, content needs to be cached as close as possible to users. ‘People think that data is in the cloud, but it’s not. Internet Drift: How the Internet is Likely to Splinter and Fracture, Steve Song, 2018 Internet Economics is a Thing and we Need to Take Note, Geoff Huston, 2018 The Submarine Cable Map, TeleGeography, 2019 The rapid uptake of cloud computing, connected devices, streaming and countless other services many of us now take for granted - combined with users’ expectation that it all works quickly and smoothly - put major pressure on service providers. Still, the rapid expansion of the submarine cable network in the last decade was largely fueled by the meteoric increase in demand for internet services. In this context, physical ownership of undersea infrastructure to mitigate the risk of surveillance is emerging as an investment motivation. Given that 95 percent of the internet’s data and voice traffic travels between continents underwater, the corporate and political powers that influence and control the infrastructure can have significant global social and security implications. The Snowden revelations in 2014 exposed the extent of government surveillance of internet infrastructure, including fibre optic cables. Currently, Google alone owns six active submarine cables, and plans to have eight more ready within two years.Īn equally significant driver of investment in undersea cables today are concerns regarding cybersecurity. In fact, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft owned or leased more than half of the undersea bandwidth in 2018. Because they now make up the greater part of undersea cable traffic, internet companies are beginning to finance and construct their own undersea cables. Today, the investment landscape in undersea cables is shifting yet again. In the 1990s, undersea cables began to attract investment from private companies, who saw the potential to make a profit by selling capacity to telecom companies and private companies alike. ![]() Historically, these submarine cables have been built by telecom carriers, who form consortia to finance the construction of a cable. This network of submarine cables transports petabytes of information around the world on a daily basis, in a manner that is invisible to most users - a huge technical feat. The data in this map were provided by EMODnet human activities.This global submarine cable network is growing, bringing the opportunity of high speed internet to more people, including in remote island nations. Click on one of the cables to learn more about its type, length, capacity, when it was installed and who maintains it. The map of the week features a schematic representation of the submarine communication cables that cross European waters. Submarine telecommunication cable networks cost billions to install 1 and need constant monitoring and repair, as they may be broken or damaged by trawl fishing, anchors, earthquakes, submarine landslides and even shark bites 2. However, this capacity comes at a significant price. These fibre-optic cables have the capacity to transmit data at a staggering 200 terabits per second 1, which vastly outpaces today’s satellite radio transmission (around 1 gigabits per second), making them the preferred means of communication. While these early cables consisted of insulated copper wires, which were simply dropped on the seabed, current generation submarine cables consist of optical fibres covered by many protective layers buried in the seafloor 2. Submarine cables have a long history starting with the first commercial submarine telegraph cable in the English Channel in 1850, closely followed by the first transatlantic cable in 1866 1. ![]() With over 99% of international internet and telephone traffic passing through submarine telecommunication cables 1, they are a vital though often forgotten part of today’s digital society. Whenever you access a website hosted on a foreign server, chances are high that the information you are receiving travelled through the depths of the ocean.
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