The Cables That Run the Internet | Hacker News Reader

The Cables That Run the Internet

cnet.com

100 pointsredbell30 comments

The main threat mentioned here is governments sabotaging cables in order to disrupt Internet connectivity, but another important one (that's deliberately invisible) is governments tapping these cables.

Even though we have a lot more transport encryption nowadays, communications metadata is still very vulnerable, and undersea cables are appealing targets to spies.

> undersea cables are appealing targets to spies.

Why go under the sea ? Frankfurt and London are beautiful towns. /s

i rekon that albeit being more costly, it is also more stealthy

I think you can ask this question to Snowden papers. IIRC they detail how and why they tap these cables.

https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

The tiny cable loop in the Gulf of Mexico between Texas and Louisiana area is just depressing...

Why was that the solution?

Its really bringing to mind all the issues the US has with infrastructure implementation on dry land. Sigh.

If you click on the segment, can see that it is Tampnet. It looks like they provide fiber and mobile networks to offshore drilling. That is right location for oil fields.

What’s that ISP service call look like?

“Hey, Comcast, I need internet at my new address”

“Sure, where is it?”

“60mi south of the Louisiana coast line and 45mi east of Mexico”

“…hmm, yea we can probably swing that, it’ll be an extra $10k for ftth, otherwise we’re only running copper”

Like your fun, but for some extra seriousness, 10k$ is the order of magnitude you pay to setup FTTH in a big city. Most times, consumer ISPs eat the cost and make economies of scale by connecting entire neighborhoods, but if you don't have that chance and for some reasons ISPs won't connect you you can count on 10-50k$ infrastructure bill.

Also, consumer ISPs like Comcast are the worst. If you have good relationships in your neighborhood/municipality, going collective like with SCANI/Freifunk is always going to be more interesting and useful.

Here's a better Tampnet map: https://6999076.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/6999076...

This map is a bit more informative as to what's going on there -- the gulf of mexico network is page 2.

Why not?

Even if we were superhumanly competent at on-land infra, you still have to negotiate right of way and bury hundreds of miles of cable overland. The ocean way they just drop the cable off of the back of a boat.

Anyone know of a centralized ‘terrestrial’ cable map? This seems to be a highly fragmented space.

The closest I've found is this one, but as you say, it's rather sparsely populated terrestrially: https://openinframap.org/#5.33/19.676/-108.238/P,T

According to legend of that map, what you see in the land are electricity cables

How things have changed since FLAG (https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass) which instead of being owned by hyperscalers for their never ending desire to monopolize all the things, was owned by telcos looking to open new markets in Africa.

The maps are more up to date, but it isn't as magical as Neal Stephenson's 1996 "Mother Earth Mother Board"

Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8242682

This map makes my optimistic about humankind. Similar to https://patrickcollison.com/fast. Amazing we can achieve such feats, it's inspiring.

I read a pretty good book about this, it's title was "Tubes, a journey to the center of the internet" - I would recommend it

Seems like Starlink has potential to completely disrupt undersea cables once the network is larger. Obviously it wont ever be the same latency or bandwidth as an undersea cable but it would be near impossible to tap and much cheaper.

You're right that it won't be the same - it has the potential to be faster.

Speed of light in a vacuum is higher than what can be achieved in a fiber-optic. Combine that with a more direct path than what can be achieved with an undersea cable and things start to get interesting.

Genuinely wondering why you mention “in a vacuum”, as the signal would have to go through the atmosphere.

For the inter-satellite links. First and last hop still need to pass from the ground to LEO.

The obvious solution is to start yeeting compute and/or users into space.

I vote for users. I'll stay down here with compute, I know how this ends.

Atmosphere is practically vacuum as far as speed of light goes.

Fiber optic: 0.67c Atmosphere: 0.9997c Vacuum: 1c

Why would it be near impossible to tap? Couldn't you just fly a drone around one of the ground stations and intercept all the communication?

You might need a drone with an antenna the same size as the ground station's. I haven't seen the ground stations, but that might be hard to put on a drone.

>Why would it be near impossible to tap? Couldn't you just fly a drone around one of the ground stations and intercept all the communication?

Why bother with a drone? Just drive a van/truck/ATV with appropriate receivers near such ground stations.

Thanks for sharing this insightful post, and also the other comments with maps and movie recommendations. This is such an interesting topic

The Hummingbird Project is a great movie about building these on land

> You probably know that tech giants like Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Google run the brains of the internet.

They shall go to a doctor. The brains are a bit damaged. /s

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