Would Starlink and other satellite ISP’s be able to mitigate some of the traffic?
I suppose:
1a. that’d be a lot of cables to take out
2b. many cables are terrestrial
3c. Putin would tick off other BRICS members and other countries
4d. ship-to-ship—maybe get some airplanes and balloons involved
5e. American Navy attacks Russian vessels cutting cables, and Biden tells Putin to stop this folly
The US has been able to send bandwidth via laser beam long distances for a while. I wonder if they could set up a network this way to bypass any bad cables. Even if only while they are being repaired.
Even without curvature, there’s way too much atmospheric interference for that. Laser communication works well in space where there is literally nothing in the way, including ajr. Even point to point microwaves only kind of work on earth.
Not across oceans though. Earth is curved.
Not just curved, but curved quite substantially, despite what your eyes may tell you. At eye level on a flat plain you can only see about 3 miles due to the curvature. The closest points across the Atlantic are 1,770 miles apart.
Lasers work really well in space for secure sat-to-sat data links, but are a lot less viable on Earth’s surface due to diffraction and weather, nevermind the limits of the visible horizon for any height of a communications tower. For pretty much any scenario where laser comms would be considered, microwave RF links would likely be just as good, cheaper, and more commonly deployed and understood by telecom engineers. The only exception is when absurdly high bandwidths are needed, which is where lasers rule.
But using RF links across thousands of kilometers of oceanic waters? For that, you must construct additional pylons on floating islands to repeat the signal. Otherwise, the only RF signals that could reach land would be too low frequency to carry much bandwidth.
For reference, when the German Aerospace Center (DLR) set the world record in 2016 for free-space optical communications, they achieved 1.72 Tbits/sec over a distance of 10.45 km. Most optical systems observe a bandwidth/distance relationship, where at best, shooting the signal farther means less available bandwidth, or more bandwidth if brought closer. This is a related to the Shannon-Hartley theorem, since the limiting factor is optical noise.
So if 1.72 Tbits/sec at 10 km is the best they achieved in free air in 2016, then that pales in comparison to the undersea fibre cables of 2006, where a section of the SHEFA-2 Scottish-Faroese cable runs unamplified for 390 km and moves 570 Gbits/sec aggregate.
In short, free-space lasers are fast and long-distance. But lasers within fibre cables are much faster and cover even longer distances. They’re not even in the same league.
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.
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.
I think you’re greatly underestimating how many non large corporations just host their shit in US-East 1.
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. 🙂)
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.
