Would Starlink and other satellite ISP’s be able to mitigate some of the traffic?
Almost none of it.
The amount of data flowing through undersea cables around the world is insane compared to the inter-satellite links available.
That being said, a lot of data that you use as a consumer on a daily basis doesn’t pass through any undersea cable at all. It’s more of a business problem than an individual problem.
The majority of the websites or online services you access are locally hosted on your own continent. Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, etc. all have local servers. Even for video games, most of the traffic is local just due to lag issues caused by too much distance.
What would break? Banking and financial institutions transferring money to or from overseas institutions to complete investments and loans ,Communications (Like e-mailing or calling a factory in China from the US, or contacting your Grandma in Thailand), International shipping, Flight tracking, etc.
While the satellites could take over for some of that, what would likely happen is specific companies would bid up the price for that limited capacity, and less financially valuable uses like being able to look at the latest lemmy posts from European submitters wouldn’t work.
I think you’re greatly underestimating how many non large corporations just host their shit in US-East 1.
Wouldn’t you think video streaming would be the first to go? Also music and podcasts. First in line is critical things like banking, credit cards, etc. It’s actually convenient that the most important things are the smallest data size. The problem I see is that so many companies are putting everything on the cloud.
You have to remember that the cloud is just a series of data centers owned by cloud providers. If you are Netflix, you’re not hosting Stranger Things for audiences in the US from the EU. You have a copy of it in both places and leverage AWS regions in each area to server geographically closer users (it’s typically called latency based routing). If the undersea cables are cut, the EU still watches Netflix because the content doesn’t need to travel undersea, it’s already in the EU, same thing in the US. The challenge comes in at the end of the month when people pay their Netflix bills and the banks needs to process international payments. End users are largely not impacted by direct service outages but big companies are.
