The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat
theverge.com
theverge.com
I remained hidden below water as a technical show diver, while 1800 to 2000 audience members topside were getting impatient with a "technical delay" show pause. Typically, we were checking for faults in safety systems on underwater lifts, or for a potential hydraulics leak. We'd exit under the audience seating and go back to work after clearing the issue.
In a world filled with high-tech desk jobs, finance, and non-tangible products, and having grown up working class, I have great respect for all the people behind the scenes physically keeping our tenuous world together. Some of this became readily apparent with once invisible food delivery and restaurant workers during COVID. Healthcare workers obviously came into their own too, but so many other workers were still taken for granted.
I visualize a person huffing when their internet is slow or intermittent with a guy out to sea working during a storm or under difficult conditions and I laugh at the juxtaposition and perspective of both. I also do rope work and had to resort to doing more of it during COVID because my 'desk work' dried up a bit. Hanging 300ft off of a building with a black balaclava and mask with all-black rigging equipment in NJ doing a facade inspection across from the FBI building was certainly a memorable one. (Note: all-black equipment is standard for theater and entertainment work to stay hidden. I did confirm the FBI building people were informed there would be 4 guys on ropes that day. You never know!). I have been programming since 1978, but I have always had to have some physicality to my work in order to be satisfied. I guess it's having a more tangible connection to the world not abstracted away several layers.
Here's a video during construction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35WJDSoA8Ag&t=13s
And you can check YouTube out for more of the motorcycle act, Russian Swings, high-dive, and other acts.
This also describes me pretty well. I was trained as a merchant ship's deck officer but opted to not go to sea as a career. Instead, I've spent my career building embedded systems. Every so often, I build a desktop app or a web application, but it lacks the satisfaction of being able to touch the hardware and actually watch my code affect something in the physical world.
This is satisfying. Especially anything electromechanical.
In a similar tangent, I believe social media isn't really social since you don't have people face to face talking to each other. The physical touch and facial expressions are quite important.
On his last of the only two trips he made, he was based in Recife in northern Brazil. The ship was just there, on call, ready to respond to any breakages.
My Mum, sister, and I were lucky enough to be flown out to Brazil for Christmas 2001, and it's something I'll never forget. I got to fuse bits of fibre-optic cable together under a microscope, drive an ROV about in the harbour a bit, and stand in some massive cable drums (all incredibly exciting for an eight year old child). It was the first time I went abroad, and the first time my Mum flew on a plane.
It's amazing how much damage the dot com bubble bursting did to the industry, and the people who worked in it (I don't think my Dad ever really recovered from it). I believe until very recently there was so much fibre laid during the dot com boom, that we didn't really need to lay much more.
My understanding is that there was a one-two punch of the dot com boom laying a huge amount of fiber followed by wave division multiplexing shortly afterwards massively increasing the capacity of existing fiber that resulted in an oversupply that lasted a decade or more.
With optical amplifiers you can amplifiy every color of the rainbow at once, without breaking the chain.
The book discusses "Operation Ivy Bells" whose mission was to tap the underwater Soviet communication lines during the Cold War. The submarine installed a recording pod onto Soviet cables and recorded everything.
How did they find the cables?
A technician told a story about growing up on the Mississippi river, and how you could often find a sign on the bank, telling you that there were underwater cables. He hypothesized that the same thing might exist in the Soviet union.
Sure enough, the submarine secretly crept into Soviet water, popped the periscope, and found a sign in Russian on the bank, saying be careful, underwater cables.
It's rumored that when the Soviets learned of this, they went down and found the pods. During disassembly, they found a stamped plate deep inside which read "Made in the USA."
This makes it marginally easier to read: https://archive.is/IpfNq
You can even buy printed versions: https://shop.telegeography.com/collections/telecom-maps/
US-Russia, sure, probably, but this is not the case with US-China. PLCN (https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/trans-pacific/p...), which was planned to land on Hong Kong (not even mainland China), has been significantly modified (now lands to Taiwan and the Philippines, with no sister cable to Hong Kong) due to objections from the US. There are also other plans to have a direct Shanghai-US connections (mainly for lower latency for financial information) that both governments have basically killed due to national security concerns.
Still a good and interesting article.
I read the article over 3 devices and scrolling can get pretty buggy.
Do read it. It's a well written and also very affecting insight into the lives of people doing essential work under difficult conditions.
You failed the marshmallow test [1]. There is a traditional, long-form article that presents a rewarding read.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experim...
This is what goes through the toddlers’ heads too! Gauging credibility is inextricably entangled with patience and Kahmeman’s System 2 thinking [1][2].
If this were a random article, sure, you shouldn’t trust. But it’s not. It’s on HN’s front page.
Most of the HN front page aren’t marshmallows. If you believe they are, it’s irrational to be here, let alone waste time commenting about it.
The marshmallow test should have a follow up, where the person offering the marshmallow has to prove credibility, and the person receiving it has to decide if it's worth waiting. Would be an interesting view of human interactions.
This thread is becoming a parody of itself. I linked to literally this study above [1][2].
This is like “you can have a headache now and, if you wait, might get something later, perhaps a punch in the face, perhaps a slice of pie, perhaps nothing.”
The kid knows what the payoff is.
The payoff here is unknown.
Only then is the test relevant to humans. Otherwise, all that's really being tested is the reader's trust in the publisher.
I agree that most articles that start with slides are just dross, this one is an exception.
I didn't downvote but reading an unknown article with unknown or non-existent payoff is not the same premise as The Marshmallow Test because the Stanford experiment explicitly specifies the "reward" upfront: ">, a child was offered a choice between one small but immediate reward, or two small rewards if they waited for a period of time."
In contrast, reading unfamiliar articles to _maybe_ get a "reward" is a Bayesian Probability. As the one reads each sentence that's not engaging, the expectation that there might be a "reward" at the end is tainted by the fact that most long articles in the past that reader forced themselves to finish didn't present a worthwhile reward at the end.
Now, if JumpCrisscross explicitly told the reader that there would be a guaranteed mind-blowing insight payoff at the end of the long article before the reader started it, then the test of that patience would be closer to The Marshmallow test.
> if JumpCrisscross explicitly told the reader that there would be a guaranteed mind-blowing insight payoff at the end
I literally said it’s “a rewarding read.”
Time is precious, and I choose not to waste mine on the unnecessarily slow consumption of annoyingly-formatted articles.
I came across this hypothesis recently:
"A lot of the magic of ChatGPT is nothing to do with AI, it’s just nice to consume high-quality internet content without ads or whacky custom formatting."[0]
We’re both commenting on a thread about the value of time against about three seconds of scrolling. It’s safe to say nobody here, myself included, is particularly constrained in terms of time and energy.
It's also longer than 160 characters, so no matter how it's presented it would still be a waste of time innit?
>I literally said it’s “a rewarding read.”
At the risk of stating the obvious, you wrote that reply to gp ctenb's comment _after_ he already gave up on the article and not _before_. You'd have to tell him before he considered reading the article for it to be more analogous to The Marshmallow Test. In other words, he can't "fail" your Marshmallow Test if you never set up the proper conditions for the test.
>It’s not a random article. It’s been upvoted to the HN front page.
Yes, being on the front page is one potential signal of quality but HN audience is diverse in reading preferences.
Because you happen to like this article and the front page upvotes confirms your bias, I just want to go meta and point out how some others on HN would dislike this type of "long-form human interest" article. My previous comments about that
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24270673
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26698153
This thread's article is not a fast-moving explanation about undersea cable logistics (e.g. Wendover Productions style). Instead, it frames the narrative around people such as Mitsuyoshi Hirai with long biographical sentences such as this:
>, Hirai’s mind leapt to what would come next: a tsunami. Hirai feared these waves more than most people. He had grown up hearing the story of how one afternoon in 1923, his aunt felt the ground shake, swept up her two-year-old brother, and sprinted uphill to the cemetery, narrowly escaping floods and fires that killed over 100,000 people. That child became Hirai’s father, so he owed his existence to his aunt’s quick thinking.
[...] Hirai’s career path is characteristic in its circuitousness. Growing up in the 1960s in the industrial city of Yokosuka, just down the Miura Peninsula from the Ocean Link’s port in Yokohama, he worked at his parents’ fish market from the age of 12. A teenage love of American rock ‘n’ roll led to a desire to learn English, which led him to take a job at 18 as a switchboard operator at the telecom company KDDI as a means to practice. When he was 26, he transferred to a cable landing station in Okinawa because working on the beach would let him perfect his windsurfing. This was his introduction to cable maintenance and also where he met his wife. Six years later, his English proficiency got him called back to KDDI headquarters to help design Ocean Link for KCS, a KDDI subsidiary.
A lot of readers prefer not to slog through text like that if they're really just interested in the undersea cables. It's not just the dynamic sliding photos that would dissuade potential readers to finish the article but the style of writing itself.
EDIT reply to >Lots of people don’t like dense books either.
Well, this subthread you replied to was literally complaining, ">, since the information density is too low"
Sure? Lots of people don’t like dense books either. That’s fine. It’s weird that it prompts long-form complaint comments, but I admit that’s more fun than reading.
Lol, So? HN front page has plenty of garbage.
It's less of a marshmallow thing (though I often fail that test) and more of an overwhelming impression that the article does not want me to read it.
No - just, no.
I mean yes, folks with untreated ADHD would fail a marshmallow test. Marshmallow test failure doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It simply signifies impatience and trust issues.
I closed the page at "from banks to government to TikTok", of all the glorious applications of a world wide network, the most glaring is teenagers making dance videos.
Is the reward obvious for reading any random article? No, but it may be there. But I sincerely doubt that you, or anyone, devotes themselves to consuming 100% of the content they come across on the internet, in hopes for a payoff(which may never come) in the end.
https://web.archive.org/web/20151107094324/https://www.wired...
https://historicaldigression.com/2011/03/28/the-great-easter...
Anyway, otherwise I thought this was an enjoyable read.
https://iview.abc.net.au/show/cloud-under-the-sea/video/NS23...
There is a museum on cape cod which was the end point of some early electrical cables (1891). It’s kind of interesting.
https://www.frenchcablestationmuseum.org/
Of course eclipsed by the wireless Marconi station..
Or at least it was on the other submissions days ago
Some snippets which I thought are interesting or just funny:
==========================
he worked at his parents’ fish market from the age of 12. A teenage love of American rock ‘n’ roll led to a desire to learn English, which led him to take a job at 18 as a switchboard operator at the telecom company KDDI as a means to practice. When he was 26, he transferred to a cable landing station in Okinawa because working on the beach would let him perfect his windsurfing. This was his introduction to cable maintenance and also where he met his wife.
Kobayashi learned to fish off the side of the ship and attempted to improve the repetitive cuisine by serving his crewmates sashimi. (His favorite is squid, but his colleagues would prefer he use the squid to catch mackerel.)
There are 77 cable ships in the world, according to data supplied by SubTel Forum, but most are focused on the more profitable work of laying new systems. Only 22 are designated for repair, and it’s an aging and eclectic fleet.
“We’re all happy to spend billions to build new cables, but we’re not really thinking about how we’re going to look after them,”
[after/during the earthquake]...engineers in Tokyo network operation centers watched as one cable after another failed. By the next morning, seven of Japan’s 12 transpacific cables were severed.
...the majority of the faults were located offshore of the ongoing nuclear meltdown at Fukushima. Ship operators deemed assistance too risky, which meant that, for the time being, the Ocean Link was on its own.
The first submarine cable, strung across the English Channel in 1850, survived for a single day before — in what may be apocryphal cable industry slander — a French eel fisherman accidentally hooked it, sliced off a piece, and came ashore bragging about his discovery of a new type of metal seaweed.
[this refers probably to when Google started laying own cables?] Starting around 2016, tech companies that previously purchased bandwidth from telcos began pouring billions of dollars into cable systems of their own, seeking to ensure their cloud services were always available and content libraries synced. The result has been not just a boom in new cables but a change in the topology of the internet. “In the old days we connected population centers,” said Constable, the former Huawei Marine executive. “Now we connect data centers. Eighty percent of traffic crossing the Atlantic is probably machines talking to machines.”
Maintenance providers regard these changes with ambivalence. The cable boom means there will be no shortage of cables to fix, but it also means a future of negotiating with a handful of tech giants that can use their tremendous buying power to squeeze ship operators further.
The work is extraordinarily delicate. Cables must be stripped of their polyurethane sheaths, copper conducting tubes, wire armor, and enamel coating until the clear glass threads themselves are exposed. Kurokawa then takes a glass strand from each cable, cleans them in a sonic bath (touching them risks damage and splinters), cleaves their ends at perfect right angles, and places them inside a black toaster-sized box called a fusion splicer, their ends almost but not quite touching. In an instant, the device aligns the ends and zaps an electric arc between them, melting the glass together. Kurokawa then winds the newly spliced fiber into a metal tube called a joint box and does it all again for the next fiber strand. The entire process can take 20 hours, with Kurokawa and his team working in shifts. Every step demands hunched, jeweler-like focus as they seek perfect precision — not in a seismically isolated clean room but in the belly of a rocking ship. Each joint is expected to function untouched under crushing pressure for at least 25 years.
==========================
It's actually a very good read.
I think small semantic issues like this should be ignored so we can enjoy worthwhile discussion.
> If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function. The financial system would immediately freeze. Currency trading would stop; stock exchanges would close. Banks and governments would be unable to move funds between countries because the Swift and US interbank systems both rely on submarine cables to settle over $10 trillion in transactions each day. In large swaths of the world, people would discover their credit cards no longer worked and ATMs would dispense no cash. As US Federal Reserve staff director Steve Malphrus said at a 2009 cable security conference, “When communications networks go down, the financial services sector does not grind to a halt. It snaps to a halt.”
> Corporations would lose the ability to coordinate overseas manufacturing and logistics. Seemingly local institutions would be paralyzed as outsourced accounting, personnel, and customer service departments went dark. Governments, which rely on the same cables as everyone else for the vast majority of their communications, would be largely cut off from their overseas outposts and each other. Satellites would not be able to pick up even half a percent of the traffic. Contemplating the prospect of a mass cable cut to the UK, then-MP Rishi Sunak concluded, “Short of nuclear or biological warfare, it is difficult to think of a threat that could be more justifiably described as existential.”
You could still argue with "the world's most important" claim, but this makes it clear that it is at least somewhat defensible.
Millisecond-level currency trading would cease, but second- or minute-level trading would continue, and that would not dramatically destroy economies.
ATMs of foreign banks might stop working; local banks should continue.
Watching video from a foreign server would no longer be possible, but that's not the end of the world.
And so on. It would slow many things down, some things would stop, but it wouldn't be the end of modern civilization.
That's some kind of understatement, assuming that TFA is correct:
> Satellites would not be able to pick up even half a percent of the traffic.
I very much doubt that the trading systems that today rely on international data cables can be run via phones and voice communications, and I also wonder just how much of the phone system (even domestically within the USA) paradoxically relies in submarine cables.
So? How much of that traffic is video? If you eliminate that, what percentage of the rest can satellite pick up?
I was not proposing that trading systems run via phones and voice. No, those are much less bandwidth-efficient than data. I was proposing that they continue to be run by data, just with lower frequency. (Will the global economy really collapse without HFT on currencies?)