One common part of almost every human being, from a four year old kid to an old woman and everyone in between is the internet, one of the greatest inventions of the field of science and which is the stem support of the growing technology of our future. The whole society of the 21st century is now building around this one revolutionary invention of Robert E. Kahn and Vint Cerf, and everything companies develop from smartphones to space expeditions today, is more about integration of the internet in a more advanced way than the development of the basics. Our daily lives starting from watching movies to developing new friendships are now a responsibility of the internet and yet, there are important aspects about it that lay right beneath our streets and playgrounds which remain unknown.
One of the most unimaginable creations in the history of technology is how the internet connects the seven continents and the vast oceans between them together. The greatest source of today’s world, starting from Google to Facebook and extending to all the solutions to your assignments, the internet, one of the most important aspects of our everyday lives. How does it reach us? Have you ever imagined?
All of the internet works with cables, 99% of which is responsible for the international data. These are fiber optic cables known as submarine communication cables which are laid down on the very bottom of the ocean floor which can be as deep as 8000 feet below the sea level. These cables also transmit phone calls and television signals and hence, increase their importance to an ultimate level. Not only laying them provides high challenges but also maintaining them at such depths where almost nothing happens is a work of high profile technology.
These cables cannot just be laid down on the ocean floor. They need to be placed on flat surfaces. These cables run hundreds of thousands of miles and costs hundreds of millions of dollars to cover distances between continents. One problem that has always existed, is the presence of sea creatures around these cables especially sharks that attack the cables and try to disrupt the network. The solution was shark-proof wire wrappers which many companies now use to shield their cables. The sharks caused four cuts in cables in the 1980s and researchers say that sharks behave like this because of electromagnetic fields from a suspended cable strumming in currents. Also, it might be just because of their curiosity as Chris Lowe, the professor who runs California State University Shark Lab says “If you had just a piece of plastic out there shaped like a cable, there’s a good chance they’d bite that too.” Sharks are just one, but there remain many more problems like an earthquake and the biggest threat can be none other than us, humans. The Internet is ever at risk of being disrupted by boat anchors. All of this is unintentional because no one wants to be the reason for cutting of Netflix for days from the whole world, but these cables lie underground and at the places we populate and it is a sure thing to accidentally cause disruptions and breaks in the system.
In 2013, Egyptian naval forces arrested three scuba divers who were trying to cut an undersea cable off the port of Alexandria that provides one-third of all internet capacity between Europe and Egypt. Internet speeds in Egypt dropped by 60 percent until the lines were repaired. The telecom community confirmed that two other cables — Europe India Gateway (EIG) and India-Middle East-Western Europe (IMEWE) — were in ‘maintenance’ mode when the SWM4 (Egypt Cables) got cut. The result was downstream congestion on networks that are going to India and around the Indian Ocean. Similar disruptions were caused in 2008. One cut can disrupt almost all regional cables and thus, it is of major importance that cables be kept safe.
The internet came around the 1980s but the cables have a far longer history. The first cables under oceans were laid in 1854, which was the first transatlantic telegraph cable, that connected Newfoundland and Ireland. Many people question this development of cables and their importance in our present generation. Don’t we have satellites that transmit phone and data signals? What about the cloud? The underground and underwater cables seem to be a thing of the past now. But the reality is that cloud systems are actually physical storages which are present at various data collection centers and are transferred through these communication cables. The optic fiber uses light to encode information and remain unfettered by weather and carry data faster and cheaper than satellites. Satellites work in two directions, receive and send back signals from space which takes more time than transmission through optical fibers.
These cables are also the source of information that spies have and normal people don’t. The message transmissions for governmental and defence organizations happen through these same cables and tapping them is a standard operating procedure for spy agencies today. The United States has a big advantage in developing large parts of the global telecommunications infrastructure, which makes it easier for them to tap data from major lines. Former NSA analyst Edward Snowden leaked stolen documents, which outraged various governments as they realized the extent to which American spy agencies were intercepting international data. In response, Brazil has launched a project to build a submarine communications cable to Portugal that bypasses the United States completely.
Have you ever felt the pain of reaching for a cable wire behind your desk to replace it or just to move it? Imagine how difficult it can be to repair damaged cables under the oceans that can be somewhere as deep as the height of the Mount Everest. Underwater cables are not easy to repair, but technology develops and we have improved in creating ways to repair cables without diving deep. Shallow water cables are repaired by the help of robots, which grab the cables and bring them to the surface. If the cables are deeper, then specially designed ships use grapnels to hoist the cables to the surface for repair.
The internet traffic is supposed to reach around 15 gigabytes per capita by 2018, which can force companies to upgrade their cables because of capacity problems. The cables we presently have are well ready to host the traffic that is yet to come. Many more developments are being made with phase modulation techniques and improvements of the submarine line terminal equipment.
“Distracted from distraction by distraction”
