Would Starlink and other satellite ISP’s be able to mitigate some of the traffic?
Basically none. The satellite link isn’t getting traffic directly between you and the server you are reaching - the satellite just relays the data to the nearest ground station that then uses the normal fibre network to get the rest of the way.
Even if you managed to reconfigure starlink to be a peering network rather than an access network, you’d still have the issue that the starlink network as a whole has orders of magnitude less bandwidth than even one under sea cable
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
That is a curious enumeration strategy
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.
Not across oceans though. Earth is curved.
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.
At 10 meters, line-of-sight is over 10 km.
From a jet traveling at 1 km, line-of-sight is over 100 km.
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.
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.
I would imagine that it would be equally devastating to Putin to cut the cables as it would be to anybody else. I want to believe that he’s bluffing, trolling everybody to get their attention and reactions.
The comments are from June. If they were going to do it, they’d have done it by now
Something like 1% of internet traffic is by satellite…
oddly enough i think the internet would have to behave in a federated way
content would need to be cached in connected areas and we would need to optimize use of the satellite connections to propagate content between federated islands
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.
By internet based, I meant attacking the internet itself, not attacking thru the internet, my mistype
They’re not going to take out the internet lol. At least if you’re not in Ukraine that is.
