Would Starlink and other satellite ISP’s be able to mitigate some of the traffic?
A large amount but at 500ms+ latency it might as well be useless for most applications.
if by “most” you mean “a scant few applications that can’t tolerate it” then sure. US to Germany pings are currently ~120ms. Not many things that can’t tolerate 500ms outside of gaming.
Rather than number of unique applications, I meant amount of traffic when I said “most.”
Stock exchanges, some but not all streaming services, gaming, and any form of direct human communication over internet would be heavily impacted. It could also potentially increase frequency of timeouts during authentication attempts which would make everything else slightly more annoying to use as well.
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.
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.
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’m pretty sure it would result in the US internet being isolated from the rest of the worlds’
Which actually works against Putin since that means his troll farms also get cut off, meaning less new material for the useful idiots to keep other useful idiots freshly indoctrinated with.
his troll farms also get cut off Why don’t we already have a hardware firewall for this?
Because generally where the West can extend their communications the people tend to provoke change for the better.
Cutting Russia off entirely for the troll farms is locking Russians into a Russian curated echo chamber, or a least doing that to an even worse extent than Putin is already trying to do himself.
I’m pretty sure it would result in the US internet being isolated from the rest of the worlds’
except for most of North and South America.
South America probably uses sea cables.
cables which might need be only a few 100 km long and remain in territorial waters.
(thanks for the WP link. 🙂)
They’re not going to take out the internet lol. At least if you’re not in Ukraine that is.
Mid year 2018, maybe it was 2019, there was a massive internet outage. Closest guesstimate to the causes was a truck with their boom up ran through an intersection clipping fiber and power lines, and a fiber bundle was accidentally cut in a separate incident, this was all state side. Internet went down for nearly every ISP, services dead, country wide it was found we don’t have redundancy like we thought. You see, when internet lines are built out, the lines are divided up to different owners and leases, those third parties sell backup internet services to major isp’s, but no one was checking if the backup was running across the same infrastructure at any point, sales was selling, and the backup lines worked and we never had a full bundle break previously that was carrying main and backup bundles. When this outage happened, it hit Russia as well. Russia had an internet outage because of 2 bunlde breaks in the US. This tells me they are linked to the US network, and might infact be capable of doing multiple nefarious activities that made use of the wide open hole we had in our infrastructure. Now I don’t know if our infrastructure was patched, they kept that above most peoples pay grade. But the weakness was there, and it was on display to the entire world plain as day. They could either poison our networks/DNS/routing tables/etc with their high-speed connections, or just use it as a heartbeat to see the success of internet based attacks.
