Is the Internet a big wire in the ocean?

The “backbone” of the internet, the data superhighway that connects the world's online computer networks, is a web of fibre-optic cables. Between continents and land masses, the internet relies on cables crossing the sea floor.

Does the internet use cables in the ocean?

Google and Facebook are invested in dozens of subsea internet cable projects around the world. Laying these cables takes months of preparation, and specialized vessels take them out to sea. Once laid, the cables can ferry huge quantities of internet data around the globe. See more stories on Insider's business page.

How big are the internet cables in the ocean?

Modern cables are typically about 25 mm (1 in) in diameter and weigh around 1.4 tonnes per kilometre (2.5 short tons per mile; 2.2 long tons per mile) for the deep-sea sections which comprise the majority of the run, although larger and heavier cables are used for shallow-water sections near shore.

How thick are the internet cables under the ocean?

Each is usually about 3 inches across. They're actually thicker in more shallow areas, where they're often buried to protect against contact with fishing boats, marine beds, or other objects.

What happens if an undersea cable breaks?

A working fiber will transmit those pulses all the way across the ocean, but a broken one will bounce it back from the site of the damage. By measuring the time it takes for the reflections to come back, the engineers can figure out where along the cable they have a problem.

Deep Sea Internet Cables Connect the World

Is the internet underwater?

The “backbone” of the internet, the data superhighway that connects the world's online computer networks, is a web of fibre-optic cables. Between continents and land masses, the internet relies on cables crossing the sea floor.

How are internet lines in the ocean?

Currently, 98% of international internet traffic flows through undersea cables, according to Google data: "A vast underwater network of cables crisscrossing the ocean makes it possible to share, search, send and receive information around the world at the speed of light." These cables are made of optical fibre.

Who owns the internet cables in the ocean?

In fact, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft owned or leased more than half of the undersea bandwidth in 2018. Currently, Google alone owns six active submarine cables, and plans to have eight more ready within two years.

How long do undersea cables last?

Cables are engineered with a minimum design life of 25 years, but there is nothing magical about this time span. Cables may remain operational longer than 25 years, but they're often retired earlier because they're economically obsolete.

What protects the internet cables from the water?

The International Cable Protection Committee has been working for years to prevent such breaks. As a result, cables today are covered in steel armor and buried beneath the seafloor at their shore-ends, where the human threat is most concentrated. This provides some level of protection.

How deep is the Atlantic cable?

By August 5, the cable had been successfully laid, stretching nearly 2,000 miles across the Atlantic at a depth often of more than two miles.

Who controls the world's internet?

The Internet is different. It is coordinated by a private-sector nonprofit organization called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which was set up by the United States in 1998 to take over the activities performed for 30 years, amazingly, by a single ponytailed professor in California.

Is the internet thousands of cables under the ocean?

In reality, most of the world's communications (99 percent of it, to be precise) rely on some 745,000 miles of physical cabling that runs buried in shallow trenches cut into the ocean floors, or even just sat atop them. Connecting parts of the world not yet connected will mean many more thousands of miles to come yet.

Is there fiber optic cable under the ocean?

Today, there is a network of more than one million submerged kilometers of fiber optic cables crisscrossing the world's oceans, pulsing with light as data is passed from one continent to another. First laid for telecommunications, fiber optic cables are now also finding expanded use by oceanographers.

Where is internet located?

Today, the internet is basically housed in the data centers located in the Washington-area suburb, which is the biggest data center market in the world. “The internet itself is really comprised of these peering points that are housed inside data centers.

Is the Icloud under the sea?

The reality is that the cloud is actually under the ocean. Even though they might seem behind the times, fibre-optic cables are actually state-of-the-art global communications technologies. Since they use light to encode information and remain unfettered by weather, cables carry data faster and cheaper than satellites.

How is the world internet connected?

Undersea cables are responsible for moving data between countries and continents at high speeds, making everything from photo sharing to financial transactions possible. These cables use fiber optics to move data at high speeds to land, where the data is then conveyed via fiber optics to homes and businesses.

How big is the Atlantic cable?

A cable stretching 4,000 miles between the US and Spain is the key to a high-speed future. 6,000 metres beneath the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean, traversing live volcanoes, coral reefs and earthquake zones, lies an unassuming cable around 1.5 times the diameter of a garden hose.

Can US shut down internet?

The regulations that the United States uses to regulate the information and data industry may have inadvertently made a true "Internet kill switch" impossible. The lack of regulation allowed for building of a patch-work system (ISPs, Internet Backbone) that is extremely complex and not fully known.

Is it possible to shutdown the Internet worldwide?

You can dam or divert individual streams, but it is virtually impossible to block them all at once, because the water always tries to find a new route downhill. Likewise, the internet is a huge and complex structure operated by a mixture of government and commercial bodies – as well as billions of private individuals.

Can someone own the Internet?

No government can lay claim to owning the Internet, nor can any company. The Internet is like the telephone system — no one owns the whole thing. From another point of view, thousands of people and organizations own the Internet. The Internet consists of lots of different bits and pieces, each of which has an owner.

Can Russia cut underwater cables?

In the most globally damaging scenario, the Russian military could target any of the dozens of submarine cables linking other parts of Europe to the global internet—and which, by extension, may carry traffic originating in (and destined for) Ukraine.

What cables are under the ocean?

Subsea or submarine cables are fiber optic cables that connect countries across the world via cables laid on the ocean floor. These cables – often thousands of miles in length – are able to transmit huge amounts of data rapidly from one point to another.

What is the longest undersea cable?

SEA-ME-WE3 or South-East Asia - Middle East - Western Europe 3 is an optical submarine telecommunications cable linking those regions and is the longest in the world.