Would Starlink and other satellite ISP’s be able to mitigate some of the traffic?
A cable-cutting war will be absolutely devastating to the global economy. It’s the modern equivalent of Mutually Assured Destruction. There are few viable contingency plans.
I say this as a telecom wonk: hope and pray and vote so that war never comes.
You’re not emphasizing the MAD part of it enough.
Russia’s threats are all thermonuclear, fuck everyone, we’re all going to die, kind of threats.
Nukes being the first, then they were saber rattling about satellite destruction, now under sea cables.
But go ahead and watch Russia cut an undersea NATO cable and suddenly have the entirety of NATO bearing down on them for starting a war. Or watch them start shooting down satellites and ruin the ability to put anything in space at all including their own positioning and communications systems and make them a pariah to literally every country on earth that might need a satellite for something.
Russia is not strong enough domestically to do much of anything. They are certainly not strong enough domestically to thrive on their own, and literally all the cards they have to play end with the entire world turning against them.
I say this as a telecom wonk: hope and pray and vote so that war never comes.
All the more reason to support piracy.
Everyone is talking about this like it would be a snow day or something.
You’re right - it would be a catastrophe. I think companies that could function in any way without offshore servers of some kind would be a rarity.
The question is, exactly how much impact could Russia have. Enough that we couldn’t route around it? Probably not.