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It goes down on the bottom of the seabed and just stays there. Things become more difficult the closer you get to shore. A cable that is only a few centimeters thick on the bottom of the ocean must be armored from its environment as reaches the landing station that links it with the country's internet backbone.
A cable laying ship unloading the Marea cable between the US and Europe. That hose is wrapped in copper, which conducts the direct current that powers the cable and its repeaters, sometimes up to 10, volts. Cables in less hospitable areas can be far thicker than garden hoses, wrapped in extra plastic, kevlar armor plating, and stainless steel to ensure they can't be broken.
Depending on the coast, cable companies might also have to build concrete trenches far out to sea, to tuck the cable in to protect it from being bashed against rocks. Once the route is plotted and checked, and the shore connections are secure, huge cable laying ships begin passing out the equipment. The 6, kilometer 4, mile Marea cable weighs over 4.
It took more than two years to lay the entire thing. Part of the 6, kilometer 4, mile Marea cable, funded by Microsoft and Facebook, aboard a cable-laying ship.
Malicious cuts. The blackout came without warning. In February , a whole swath of North Africa and the Persian Gulf suddenly went offline, or saw internet speeds slow to a painful crawl. This disruption was eventually traced to damage to three undersea cables off the Egyptian coast.
At least one -- linking Dubai and Oman -- was severed by an abandoned, 5, kilogram 6-ton anchor, the cable's owner said. But the cause of the other damage was never explained, with suggestions it could have been the work of saboteurs. That raises the issue of another threat to undersea cables: deliberate human attacks. In a paper for the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange, British lawmaker Rishi Sunak wrote that "security remains a challenge" for undersea cables.
A successful attack would deal a crippling blow to Britain's security and prosperity. However, with more than 50 cables connected to the UK alone , Clatterbuck was skeptical about how useful a deliberate outage could be in a time of war, pointing to the level of coordination and resources required to cut multiple cables at once.
It would likely be easier to target onshore internet infrastructure with cyber and DDoS attacks, flooding the network and knocking key facilities offline. Though even then, Clatterbuck pointed out, military and other government organizations likely have satellite backups.
Submarines a centerpiece of Russia's navy Submarine spying. Tapping underwater cables is not a new thing. Should we all be worrying about a digital blackout — whether caused by accident or terrorists? The answer to this is not black and white. Any individual cable is always at risk, but likely far more so from boaters and fishermen than any saboteur. Over history, the single largest cause of disruption has been people unintentionally dropping anchors and nets.
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. Sabotage has actually been rare in the history of undersea cables. There are certainly occurrences though none recently , but these are disproportionately publicized. Yet you hear little about the regular faults that occur, on average, about times each year. Cable companies have been trying to do so for more than a century, since the first telegraph lines were laid in the s. There is a lot of planning that goes into the route the ship will take - undersea mountains, valleys, coral reefs, rocks, and fault lines are all taken into consideration.
Preferably, the cables will also be located in areas that minimize the risk of damage from boat anchors and fishing trawlers. To save time in the process, ships can even start from two separate points and lay cable until they meet, then attach the two cables together. Sharks and spies! What are the dangers to undersea cables? Well, as it turns out sharks find them to be quite tasty. On multiple occasions, sharks have been caught gnawing on the cables, and no one is really sure why.
My theory. The point remains that sharks are chewing on the Internet, and sometimes damage it. In response, companies such as Google are shielding their cables in shark-proof wire wrappers. Another danger of undersea cables is they lay on or under the sea floor unprotected from spying.
The USSR transmitted weakly encoded messages during the Cold War through a cable that the Soviets thought was too well guarded to be of any concern. The United States developed a special submarine called the U. Halibut to wiretap the cable and pick up the transmissions at regular intervals.
Ever since, it has been a common occurrence to tap underwater transmission cables for information. Image Credit: Mental Floss.
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