Protecting miles and miles of cable running through the wilderness is an herculean task, especially since usually nobody attempts to attack it. One can of course do a three-way fallback of landline/direct radio link/satellite, but that would be insane cost for, again, basically no benefit and no bandwidth.
Two fiber lines is really the best thing you're going to get if you want good and fast internet speeds at reasonable prices.
Don’t tell the folks at UMN, they’ll look at it and think, “OMG! It would be so easy to cut with an axe. Such a massive security vulnerability. Bet I could write a paper about this. Where’s my axe?”
But probably not so great for the crowd that thinks they can't live without 1 Gbps and TBs of data/month.
Doing napkin math, the village has 2k people, so let's assume 400 households. If each of those wants 100 Mbit/s, we'd need a 40 Gbit/s link. Maybe 10 Gbit/s with over-provisioning. So that's basically a satellite only for this village. Not to mention that satellites have their own set of vulnerabilities.
Probably easier to just lay a redundant fiber liner and use star link for emergencies, in case the robotic beavers take over :)
There's no single topology of the Internet, but if I had to try and sum it up: it approaches a mesh at the core, and approaches a star at the edge. Backbones peer with thousands of providers; businesses may have a primary and backup ISP; home users are lucky to even have a second ISP offering service in their area.
> Cut submarine cables
You don’t need any of that to break havoc on the internet. Just use BGP to advertise bogus routes to any prefixes.
The average outage from these fiber cuts is orders of magnitude longer than the most catastrophic bgp hijacks.
Anyways, the mental image of robot beaver drones with glowing red eyes causing havoc makes up for it.
The easiest way to defeat a burglar alarm is with an axe through the power/communication cable.
(A better system has a battery backup and uses the cellular network, but the latter is expensive and has bandwidth problems.)
I'm not sure it is an especially valuable war tactic, because while you can probably take out some cat videos for a few hours, serious military and political communications will be redirected over satellite links quite quickly.
I’d see it as a larger concern in the context of terrorism or very asymmetric warfare.
Is it? I have access pretty much all the time and can’t name an outage (that wasn’t caused by me), ever.
When something gets broken somewhere, presumably my data gets routed around the issue.
I think that's because the system is designed to be resilient to random failures (e.g., disgruntled beaver). Submarine cables fail all the time and there are repair boats constantly fixing breakages caused by fishing, wildlife, etc.
All of the submarine cables failing at the same time (e.g., terrorist beavers) is most definitely not a random failure and would, I suspect, cause some proper havoc and take months to fix.
Masses of investment went into the fibre roll out here in New Zealand and the limiting thing now seems to be the connection to the wider world and the distances involved.
2gbps and 4gbps plans are available, but while attractive, I don’t use all my 1gbps plan and struggle to think of a home use that would. The home infrastructure required would also be significant.
It's one thing to threaten mutual nuclear destruction and quite another to give the order to actually kill hundreds of millions of people and almost certainly end or ruin your own life. Since that basically excludes any intentional act by a moral or rational actor, my understanding is that the closest calls were usually cases of mistaken intent.
A global internet outage would be devastating for economic and possibly humanitarian reasons, but would not have the degree of practical and moral deterrence that exists for nuclear weapons.