The Internet's Submarine Cable System
The Süddeutsche Newspaper last week ran an interesting article on defective cables that cut off Asia from the Internet. It was likely a ships anchor which went down where it wasn't expected and tore through three essential cables. 95% of the worlds data is pumped through sea cables. One such fiber optic cable is less than 2 cm thick. Its core holds a bundle of fiber glass cables, each thinner than a human hair. A pair of those apparently carries one terabyte of data per second. The cables are wrapped in layers of copper, plastics and steel mesh. Special ships are used to lay those cables on the bottom of the sea. In many places around the globe, there's repair ships on hold to go out and fix damaged cables. The current damage was in the Mediterranean sea and the cable ship Raymond Croze belonging to France Télécom went to fix the cables with the remote controlled submarine robot "Hector". Read more on BBC NEWS
The Guardian earlier posted a good graphic impression of the world's submarine Internet cables:
