undersea cable

Industry 4.0: The Industrial Internet of Things

by Alasdair Gilchrist  · 27 Jun 2016

the major cloud providers,Amazon, Microsoft and Google provide potentially millions of concurrent connections, and Google run their own fiber optic network, including their own under-sea cables. The cloud is a huge enabler for the Industrial Internet as it provides the infrastructure and performance that industry requires but is at the same

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and financial data. Financial institutions and banks have been analyzing this type of data at velocity, even going to the lengths of running a private submarine cable between exchanges in London and New York in order to shave a millisecond of the handling time of this valuable high-velocity Big Data. Data

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans

by David Abulafia  · 2 Oct 2019  · 1,993pp  · 478,072 words

454 , 839 , 880 , 891 , 892 , 896 , 897 ; docks 904 post-war recovery 897 Royal African Company 760 Royal Exchange 669 Royal Society 792 , 820 and under-sea cables 864 Sephardim 701 Spaniards in 455 Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue 700 , 838 Steelyard and the Hansard Kontor 447–8 , 453 tax exemptions 455 Viking raid

Some Remarks

by Neal Stephenson  · 6 Aug 2012  · 335pp  · 107,779 words

, the Bronx is to Manhattan. Today this is all quite familiar, but in the 19th century, when the first feeble bits struggled down the first undersea cable joining the Old World to the New, it must have made people’s hair stand up on end in more than just the purely electrical

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barnyard, improvised quality until the Year of Our Lord 1858, when the terrifyingly high financial stakes and shockingly formidable technical challenges of the first transatlantic submarine cable brought certain long-simmering conflicts to a rolling boil, incarnated the old and new approaches in the persons of Dr. Wildman Whitehouse and Professor William

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less interesting. Those early cables were eventually made to work, albeit not without founding whole new fields of scientific inquiry and generating many lucrative patents. Undersea cables, and long-distance communications in general, became the highest of high tech, with many of the same connotations as rocket science or nuclear physics or

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gutta-percha (a natural gum also derived from a tree grown in Malaya) was used for submarine cables. Gutta-percha is humble-looking stuff, a nondescript brown crud that surrounds the inner core of old submarine cables to a thickness of perhaps 1 centimeter, but it was a wonder material back in those days

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, colorful, wildly diverse, essentially peaceful, and plagued only by the congestion of its own success. JARING’s link to the global Internet is over an undersea cable that connects it to the United States. This is typical of many Southeast Asian countries, which are far better connected to the US than they

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bit rate that is used for this purpose is 64 kbps. A circuit, then, in telephony jargon, amounts to a datastream of 64 kbps. Copper submarine cables of only a few decades ago could carry only a few dozen circuits—say, about 2,500 kbps total. The first generation of optical-fiber

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’t really grok the Internet. The undersized cables they are running reflect their myopic outlook.” So the bad news is that the capacity of modern undersea cables like FLAG isn’t very impressive by Internet standards, but the slightly better news is that such cables are much better than what we have

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a steel antishark jacket. As the shore is approached, various other layers of steel armoring wires are added. This more or less describes how all submarine cables are being made as of 1996. Only a few companies in the world know how to make cables like this: AT&T Submarine Systems International

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(AT&T-SSI) in the US, Alcatel in France, and KDD Submarine Cable Systems (KDD-SCS) in Japan, among others. AT&T-SSI and KDD-SCS frequently work together on large projects and are responsible for FLAG. Alcatel

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and routers were in place. Likewise, satellites have failed to match some of the latest leaps in fiber capacity and can no longer compete with submarine cables, at least until such time as low-flying constellations such as Iridium and Teledesic begin operating. Within the next few years, several huge third-generational

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? Opinions vary on this: pro-FLAG people argue that the Straits, with all of their ship traffic, are a relatively hazardous place to put a submarine cable and that a terrestrial crossing of the Malay Peninsula is a tactical masterstroke. FLAG skeptics will tell you that the terrestrial crossing is a necessity

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Egypt. THE ORIGIN OF FLAG Kessler Marketing Intelligence Corp. (KMI) is a Newport, Rhode Island, company that has developed a specialty in tracking the worldwide submarine cable system. This is not a trivial job, since there are at least 320 cable systems in operation around the world, with old ones being retired

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, for example, it wired large parts of the United Kingdom with a “cable television” system that is actually a generalized digital communication network. But transoceanic submarine cables were outside of its traditional realm. On the other hand, during the early ’90s, Nynex found itself stymied from competing in the United States because

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been put out to bid in 1993 and had turned into a competition between two consortia, one consisting of AT&T Submarine Systems and KDD Submarine Cable Systems, and the other formed around Alcatel and Fujitsu. The former group ended up landing the contract. So AT&T, which evidently felt threatened by

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up as they went along, and as often as not, they got it wrong. THOMSON AND WHITEHOUSE As of 1861, some 17,500 kilometers of submarine cable had been laid in various places around the world, of which only about 5,000 kilometers worked. The remaining 12,500 kilometers represented a loss

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and extremely powerful tool that happened to be perfectly suited to the problem of how to send electrical pulses down long submarine cables. Wildman Whitehouse predicted that sending bits down long undersea cables was going to be easy (the degradation of the signal would be proportional to the length of the cable) and William

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SUN. TECHNOLOGICAL WONDERS OF MODERN CABLE STATIONS. WHY UGANDANS COULD NOT PLACE TELEPHONE CALLS TO SEATTLE. TRAWLERS, TICKLER CHAINS, TEREDO WORMS, AND OTHER HAZARDS TO UNDERSEA CABLES. THE IMMENSE FINANCIAL STAKES INVOLVED—WHY CABLE OWNERS DO NOT CARE FOR THE COMPANY OF FISHERMEN, AND VICE VERSA. 35˚ 17.690' N, 139˚ 46

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Japanese international telecommunications network in 1964, was relegated to a laboratory for Niiro. The goal was to make KDD a player in the optical-fiber submarine cable manufacturing business. Such a move was not without controversy in the senior ranks of KDD, who had devoted themselves to a very different corporate mission

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and institutions. AT&T, in other words. Unlike the United States or France or Great Britain, Japan was never much of a player in the submarine cable business back in the prewar days, and so Ohta’s and Niiro’s notion of going into head-to-head competition against AT&T, its

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very best quality control. Cables and repeaters have to work for at least 25 years under some really unpleasant conditions. KDD Submarine Cable Systems (KDD-SCS) built its first optical fiber submarine cable system, TPC–3, in 1989 and will soon have more than 100,000 kilometers of cable in service worldwide. It designs

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some of its resources into one of those famous far-sighted long-range Japanese R&D programs, it paid off beautifully. In the field of submarine cable systems, the lowly assistant has taught the sumo champion a lesson and sent him reeling back—not quite out of the ring, but certainly enough

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and as a cringing sidekick to the even bigger and more sinister AT&T. Michio Kuroda is a KDD executive who negotiates deals relating to submarine cables. He tells of a friend of his, a KDD employee who went to the United States two decades ago to study at a university and

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afterward, AT&T decided to adopt an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” strategy toward FLAG, which eventually led to it and KDD Submarine Cable Systems getting the contract to build FLAG’s cable and repeaters. (AT&T-SSI is supplying 64 percent of the cable and 59 percent of

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FLAG managed to cut a deal with China Telecom to run a full-bore 10.6 Gbps spur straight into Shanghai. While China has other undersea cable connections, they are tiny compared with FLAG, which is now set to be the first big cable, as well as the first modern Internet connection

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compete with AT&T in the future. HAZARDS Dr. Wildman Whitehouse and his 5-foot-long induction coils were the first hazard to destroy a submarine cable but hardly the last. It sometimes seems as though every force of nature, every flaw in the human character, and every biological organism on the

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like a science fiction creature, a bivalve with a rasp-edged shell that it uses like a buzz saw to cut through wood—or through submarine cables. Cable companies learned the hard way, early on, that it likes to eat gutta-percha, and subsequent cables received a helical wrapping of copper tape

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. Most of the fishing-related damage is caused by trawlers, which tow big sacklike nets behind them. Trawlers seem designed for the purpose of damaging submarine cables. Various types of hardware are attached to the nets. In some cases, these are otter boards, which act something like rudders to push the net

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the case of a data haven. Somewhat to his own surprise and relief, he concluded that it simply wasn’t going to happen. “Cutting a submarine cable,” Barnes says, “is like starting a nuclear war. It’s easy to do, the results are devastating, and as soon as one country does it

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minute the cable is down. Upcoming advances in fiber bandwidth may push this figure, for some cables, past the million-dollar-a-minute mark. Clearly, submarine cable repair is a good business to be in. Cable repair ships are standing by in ports all over the world, on 24-hour call, waiting

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, one conductor at a time. Engineer Musalam watched attentively while I badgered him with nerdy questions.He brought me up to speed on the latest submarine cable gossip. During the previous month, in mid-June, SEA-ME-WE 2 had been cut twice between Djibouti and India. Two cable ships, Restorer and

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as SEA-ME-WE 1 and 2, which is also the same building that will be used by FLAG. In addition, there is a new submarine cable called Africa 1 that is going to completely encircle that continent, it being much easier to circumnavigate Africa with a cable-laying ship than to

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a great deal of his intellectual gifts on pursuits that, I thought at first, could hardly have been less relevant to his earlier work on undersea cables. But that was my problem, not his. I didn’t figure out what he was up to until very close to the ragged end of

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beach proclaiming “Telephone Cable” as a feeble effort to dissuade mariners from using the bay for anchor practice. It was here that the long-range submarine cable business, after any number of early-round knockdowns, finally dragged its bloody self up off the mat and really began to kick ass. By the

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never went to Falmouth—a major port some 50 kilometers from Porthcurno. Enough anchors had hooked cables, even by that point, that “major port” and “submarine cable station” were seen to be incompatible, so the landing site was moved to Porthcurno.That was just the beginning: the company (later called the Eastern

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later, after the Italian had worked the bugs out of the system, the government stepped in and arranged a merger between his company and the submarine cable companies to create a new, fully integrated communications monopoly called Cable & Wireless. 50˚ 2.602' N, 5˚ 39.054' W Museum of Submarine Telegraphy, Porthcurno

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other). The vibration in the glass siphon tube reduced the friction against the paper tape to the point where even the weak currents in a submarine cable could move it back and forth. Movement to one side of the tape represented a dot, to the other side a dash. We prevailed upon

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how thin it gets. Exactly the same trick is used to create the glass fibers that run down the center of FLAG and other modern submarine cables: an ingot of very pure glass is heated until it glows, and then it is stretched. The only difference is that these are solid fibers

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machines that assure a consistent result. Moving down the room, we saw a couple of large tabletops devoted to a complete, functioning reproduction of a submarine cable system as it might have looked in the 1930s. The only difference is that the thousands of miles of intervening cable are replaced with short

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. In this case the unit is only a few feet away, but in practice it would have been on the other end of a long submarine cable, say in the Azores. This regenerator/retransmitter unit sends its output to a twin siphon-tube recorder which draws both the incoming signal (say, from

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machine is not functioning correctly, it will be obvious from a glance at the tape. The regenerated signal goes down the table (or down another submarine cable) to a machine that records the message as a pattern of holes punched in tape. It also goes to a direct printer that hammers out

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in the use of the World Wide Web, generating enormous demand for bandwidth. That (in combination, of course, with other demands) creates a demand for submarine cables much longer and more ambitious than ever before, which gets investors excited—but the resulting project is so complex that the only way they can

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and make intelligent decisions is by using a computer with a graphical user interface. HACKING WIRES As you may have figured out by this point, submarine cables are an incredible pain in the ass to build, install, and operate. Hooking stuff up to the ends of them is easy by comparison. So

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at another frequency, and another, and another, to make a complicated waveform, and if that waveform could be transmitted to the other end of a submarine cable intact, then there was no reason in principle why the complex waveform known as the human voice couldn’t be transmitted in the same way

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on him, and he feels the need to just get away from his job for a few days and think about something—anything—other than submarine cables. The last time this feeling came over him, he made inquiries with a tourist bureau in Ireland that referred him to a quiet, out-of

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his room, and began ambling through the building. The first thing he saw was a display case containing samples of various types of 19th-century submarine cables. It turned out that the former owner of this mansion had been the captain of the Great Eastern, the first of the great deep-sea

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the time—so large that its utter uselessness had made it a laughingstock, the Spruce Goose of its day. The second generation of long-range submarine cables, designed to Lord Kelvin’s specifications after the debacle of 1857, were thick and heavy. Splicing segments together in mid-ocean had turned out to

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driven by power from the ship’s main engines, the ultimate capacity of Monarch’s cable engines is 30 tons. The art of laying a submarine cable is the art of using all the special features of such a ship: the linear engines, the maneuvering thrusters, and the differential GPS equipment, to

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the slack control problem. That, in combination with the company’s fleet of cable-laying ships and its human capital, makes it dominant in the submarine cable-laying world. By “human capital” I mean their ability to dispatch weather-beaten operatives such as the Lan Tao Island crowd to difficult places like

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still know how to get things done everywhere. It is not difficult to work out how all of this has informed the development of the submarine cable industry. AT&T makes really, really good cables; it has the pure technology nailed, though if it doesn’t stay on its toes, it’ll

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is the ongoing domination of the cable-laying industry by the British, and his monument is concealed beneath the waves: the ever growing web of submarine cables joining continents together. Bell founded the telephone industry. His legacy was the Bell System, and his monument was strung up on poles for all to

The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth

by Guillaume Pitron  · 14 Jun 2023  · 271pp  · 79,355 words

into the intermediary levels of the net (data link, network, transport, etc) until it reaches the first physical layer of the internet — the application — comprising undersea cables. From sender to receiver, the notification uses the 4G antenna of a mobile operator or a cable modem, and runs the length of the building

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stretch further still the limits of the grid, our attention to red and blue, driverless cars, passive funds, and artificial intelligence. That invention was the undersea cable. CHAPTER NINE Twenty thousand tentacles under the sea NEITHER TECHNICAL LIMITATIONS NOR PHYSICAL BOUNDARIES TODAY seem able to impede our quest for virtuality. The production

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named ‘bowels of the net … the parallel with sewers is interesting: not terribly glamourous, barely visible, and yet indispensable’, explains a telecommunications professional.5 The undersea cables are made of fine metal encased in polyethylene (plastic), and these enclose the fibre-optic pairs — that is, glass-fibre strands — through which coded information

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of Tonga, isolated in the middle of the Pacific, who, in 2019, were plunged into a digital blackout after the archipelago’s one-and-only undersea cable was severed. The country was ‘cut off from the rest of the world’, recalls a specialist.11 For some, never had the expression ‘life hanging

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, or 30 times the Earth’s circumference, could potentially refloor the ocean bottoms.12 This backbone of the net thrives particularly in water. Laying an undersea cable may well cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but it is still 10 times less expensive than digging trenches on land. An atlas of information

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39,000 kilometres between Northern Europe and Australia. The network is growing, and it is unstoppable.13 While these lines were being written, dozens of undersea cables were in the process of being laid on the ocean floor. At this rate, there could be a thousand in operation by 2030. Hence this

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mayor. ‘I wonder if they’ll realise the holiday snaps they’re sending are travelling below their feet.’ Some weeks earlier, everyone in the European undersea cable industry, from engineers to sales reps, consultants to strategists, met at a huge conference centre in Islington in the centre of London.15 Courtesy of

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has taken hold of the architects of the net. The industry prefers to keep a low profile. ‘One of the best ways of protecting an undersea cable is to not talk about it’, says one of its engineers. But I learn that the sector is structured around the owners of the cables

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install and repair the infrastructure (Global Marine Systems Ltd, in particular). Of note: given their strategy of vertical integration, the FAANGs now have their own undersea cables — a serious disruption for telecom operators. This is the case for Facebook, which has formed its own team dedicated to its subsea foundations. And for

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.21 A year later, a dozen countries in West Africa saw their connection slow down for 10 days after the ACE (Africa Coast to Europe) undersea cable was damaged by a fishing trawler.22 According to research, the anchors of fishing boats, and cargo ships, are the number-one threat to internet

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traffic. ‘If cable ships weren’t spending their time repairing them, the world’s internet would be down in barely a few months’, warned an undersea cable specialist.30 The worst cable? Perhaps the one belonging to Orange — 30 metres deep and keeping close company with the Belgian city of Ostend. ‘We

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is a solution: to get in Ottawa’s good graces, Wilkie hires two members of the tribe.41 Once the plans were approved, the future undersea cable’s path had to be clear of the 82 old, abandoned cables; should these come loose from the ocean floor, they could take the Hibernia

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know this better than the architects of the web. But have they considered these impacts of its tentacles on the environment? The second life of undersea cables Curious operations are taking place this morning in November 2020 on quay number 2 of the Port of Leixões, north of Porto (Portugal). Moored three

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Greenpeace or a marine animal-rights group who wouldn’t understand that cables are not toxic, we wouldn’t see the end of it’, an undersea cable specialist told me in confidence. None of this rules out the question set to become all the more relevant as we colonise every crevice of

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and more of them’, agreed another expert. ‘So there’s no need for them to set themselves a limit.’58 The pollution caused directly by undersea cables is insignificant, but they are allowing the digital universe to expand, bringing with it more devices, data centres, and energy infrastructure. When Covid locked us

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to cool down the networks.59 ‘In ten years’ time, we’ll spend the next pandemic wearing virtual reality headsets!’ predicted a professional from the undersea cable industry.60 ‘Because consumers will want to, but mostly because technological advances in communication will mean they can.’ Yet back in 2015, Andrew Ellis, professor

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exceed the system’s capacity in eight years’ time — that is, in 2023.61 The term he used was ‘capacity crunch’. Echoing these statements, the undersea cable industry recognises that we are approaching what is known as the ‘Shannon Limit’, which is the maximum quantity of information that optical fibres can send

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have continental, if not global, consequences. This is the case for the Brazilian city of Fortaleza. ‘It is a single point of failure for all undersea cables from Brazil to the United States’, wrote an academic. ‘If Fortaleza were shut down, all data traffic that flows north and south would come to

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money to cross the 200 kilometres of Egypt landline as it does to lay the fibre from Singapore to France’, grumbled an expert from the undersea cable industry, probably exaggerating the numbers.3 But to route the Blue-Raman cable, as Google plans to do, through Israel — a state not recognised by

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) cable, operated by Vodafone, among others, will pass though Iran, again drawing the ire of Cairo. (See appendix 12.) Thus the redrawn world map of undersea cables exposes new geopolitics, whereby regions and states stand to gain from advantageous positioning: the Suez Canal, but also Great Britain, the Strait of Malacca, Djibouti

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cloud computing.23 China plans to invest $79 billion to install telephone and surveillance technology equipment, build smart cities, and, of course, lay an ambitious undersea cable network. Beijing is believed to have put into service — or is currently laying — fibre-optic networks in 76 countries, from its nearby neighbours to as

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per cent of fibre-optic cable installation costs: cable ships. Well into the 2000s, Huawei approached the UK company Global Marine — one of the biggest undersea cable installers in the world. Huawei pitched its ambitions in internet cable installation, and its expertise in fibre-optic systems. Global Marine had its eye on

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European asset is a decisive factor for not depending on a non-European cable ship that could impose its own law’, a director of an undersea cable company warned. Paris is nevertheless aware of what’s at stake. ‘Quite clearly, the company is being monitored’, a specialist told me. As for France

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the websites Quora, Ohloh, Wired & press report, 2020. APPENDIX 9 Cross-section of a fibre-optic cable Source : SciencePost APPENDIX 10 World map of undersea cables Source : Submarine Cable Map, 2022. APPENDIX 11 Route of the Hibernia Express cable Source : submarinenetworks.com APPENDIX 12 Route of future cables Europe-Persia Express Gateway (EPEG) and

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2020), which the Viettel group is connecting Vietnam, China, Japan, and Thailand (Asia Direct Cable, see ‘Asia Direct Cable Consortium to build new Asia Pacific submarine cable’, nec.com, 11 June 2020). 14 The cable went into service in February 2021. Read ‘The Dunant subsea cable, connecting the US and mainland Europe

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le monde? [‘The geopolitics of the internet. Who governs the world?’], Economica, 2013. ‘Submarine Cables and the Oceans: connecting the world’, International Cable Protection Committee, United Nations Environment Programme, World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), December 2009. 20 See ‘Undersea cables: indispensable, insecure’, Policy Exchange, 2017. 21 ‘Internet, un monde bien réel’ [‘The internet

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, a physical reality’], La Croix, 24 April 2018. 22 ‘A broken submarine cable knocked a country off the internet for two days’, The Verge, 8 April

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2018. 23 ‘Submarine cables and the oceans: connecting the world’, op. cit. 24 ‘Sécurité, pêche … Une enquête publique lancée sur le plus

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grand câble sous-marin du monde qui passe par la Côte d’Opale’ [‘Security, fishing … A public equity is opened on the world’s biggest undersea cable that crosses the Opal

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Coast’], France Info, 18 November 2019. 25 Interview with Antony Viera, general secretary of the Regional Committee of Marine Fisheries and Marine Farming (CRPMEM), Hauts-de-France, 2020. 26 ‘Submarine cables and the oceans: connecting the world’, op. cit

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. 27 Ibid. 28 ‘Vandals blamed for phone and Internet outage’, CNET, 10 April 2009. 29 ‘Vietnam’s submarine cable “lost” and “found’”, LIRNEasia, 2 June 2007. This is not an isolated event: in the article, the Vietnamese coastguard explains that it has already seized

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cables: billions of gigabytes under the sea’], Le Monde, 24 June 2018. 32 Of which fourteen are for New Zealand, and three for Australia. 33 ‘Undersea cables: indispensable, insecure’, Policy Exchange, 1 December 2017. 34 Kim Nguyen, The Hummingbird Project, 111 min, Belga Production/Item 7, 2018. 35 Before the Hibernia Express

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OpticalCloudInfra and consultant with Pioneer Consulting, 2020. 51 ‘L’Ifremer mesure l’impact des câbles sous-marins’ [‘Ifremer measures the impact of undersea cables’], Mer et Marine, 25 June 2019. 52 ‘Submarine cables and the oceans: Connecting the world’, op. cit. 53 Ibid. 54 Interview with Alwyn du Plessis, CEO of Mertech Marine, 2020

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. 64 Namely, FLAG (Fiber-optic Link Around the Globe), SEA-ME-WE 1, SEA-ME-WE 2, SEA-ME-WE 3, and AFRICA-1. See ‘Undersea cables: Indispensable, insecure’, op. cit. 65 James Cowie, ‘Syrian web outage no surprise’, Renesys Blog, 9 May 2013. 66 ‘Strangling the Internet’, op. cit. 67 Ibid

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In France, the city of Marseille in particular has become a global hub for landing fibre-optic cables. As for Brazil, read ‘EllaLink’s transatlantic submarine cable has already anchored in Portugal’, BNamericas, 6 January 2021. 5 Félix Blanc, Géopolitique des câbles: une vision sous-marine de l’Internet [‘The geopolitics of

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in 2018, Australia, fearing espionage, denied the Chinese company Huawei the possibility of landing a cable on its territory. Read ‘Australia supplants China to build undersea cable for Solomon Islands’, The Guardian, 13 June 2018. 8 Russian Optical Trans-Arctic Cable System. 9 ‘The Arctic: a new internet highway?’, Arctic Yearbook, 2014

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. 11 ‘Arctic subsea communication cables and the regional development of northern peripheries’, Arctic and North, no. 32, September 2018. 12 ‘Quintillion activates Arctic subsea cable’, Submarine Cable Networks, 13 December 2017. 13 ‘Charges: Ex-Quintillion CEO duped investors in Arctic broadband project’, Alaska Public Media, 12 April 2018. Elizabeth Pierce was arrested

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with Jean Devos, 2020. 41 Interview with Laurent Campagne, 2020. 42 Interview with Jean Devos, 2020. 43 Ibid. 44 Interview with Laurent Campagne, 2020. 45 ‘Undersea cables: Indispensable, insecure’, Policy Exchange, 1 December 2017. 46 Ibid. 47 ‘Comment la France écoute (aussi) le monde’ [‘How France (also) listens to the world’], L

The Cable

by Gillian Cookson  · 19 Sep 2012  · 136pp  · 42,864 words

later, John Brett discovered that Wheatstone himself had also in 1845 been developing a scheme for a Channel telegraph. Yet Brett continued to insist that submarine cables were ‘purely an invention of our own’ and that ‘no man’s labours or suggestions were borrowed’. In the United States, Professor Samuel Finley Breeze

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started out as an artist, was professor of Natural Science at Yale and a pioneer of land telegraphs in the United States. His experiments on submarine cables were well recorded, so his claim that he was thinking about a transatlantic cable early in the 1840s is convincing. Morse left an account of

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by 1850 was superintendent of the Nova Scotia government telegraph lines, then the only wires in the province. Gisborne put forward a plan for a submarine cable between Newfoundland and the North American mainland at Halifax. His employers gave him leave to find support for this idea in St John’s. To

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with exclusive landing rights on the island for fifty years. Experience had already shown Brett that such contracts were essential to raise sufficient money for submarine cables, which had exceptionally high capital costs. Without the promise of a monopoly and high returns, investors were not willing to back such a risky project

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be self-sufficient. England was the only possible source of submarine cables. British dominance in this area was partly a result of their monopoly on the insulating material, gutta percha. More importantly, much of the expertise accumulated during the short life of undersea cables was concentrated in Britain. Cyrus Field therefore set out again

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, both he and Bright in 1855 were ‘full of the ardor of science’ and zeal inspired by ‘the prospect of so great a triumph’. The submarine cable from Newfoundland to Cape Breton was to be laid from Port aux Basques by the barque Sarah L. Bryant, supervised by a British engineer, Samuel

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afterwards when inland telegraphs proved invaluable in deploying troops and police against the Chartist threat. The Bretts found fame as promoters of the first international submarine cable, laid between Dover and Cap Gris Nez near Calais, late in August 1850. They had obtained a ten-year concession, or monopoly, on the route

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, and from Orford Ness in Suffolk to the Netherlands. The longest of these was 100 miles, the deepest 160 fathoms. The success of these early submarine cables disguised some of their inherent flaws. On a short or shallow line, faults did not necessarily stop the telegraph from working. In the depths of

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as an insulator to submarine cables, it needed to be stored in water to retain its remarkable properties. Its supremacy lasted for a century, until the advent of polyethylene-based synthetics, handing Britain, which had a monopoly on gutta percha, a long-lasting stranglehold on the production of undersea cables. While the material itself

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turned out to be much more than a matter of waterproofing. Even when the quality of the cable was excellent, and the insulation perfectly sound, undersea cables simply did not function as expected. Messages would not pass down the line at anything like an acceptable speed without breaking down into a chaotic

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viability. The electrician Willoughby Smith lamented many years later that the phenomenon of electrical induction had not been understood sooner. Looking back at the earliest undersea cables, Smith could see that the blame for their poor performance fell upon failures in scientific understanding as well as inadequate testing and quality control. Faraday

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the Channel line of 1851, and then in the cables, 100 miles in length, connecting Orford Ness with Holland in 1853. Faraday realised that a submarine cable, made from a central copper conductor surrounded by an insulating envelope of gutta percha, armoured on the outside with iron wire rope, formed an electrical

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interior surface of the insulating sheath as a charge, and so prevents it from moving freely onward on its journey as it otherwise would. The submarine cable is virtually a lengthened out Leyden jar … a bottle for the electricity, rather than a simple channel or pipe open freely at both ends. While

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doubts persisted, submarine cables received a great boost from a national emergency, the Crimean War, which supplied the impetus and the funding for an ambitious scheme. The Crimea has

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. When coated with three layers of gutta percha, the diameter became about three-eighths of an inch, rather larger than previous submarine cables. By the time the Atlantic crossing was planned, submarine cable manufacture had become much better organised and regulated, in the hope of avoiding some of the calamities of the early projects

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, would be linked. This trial would mimic the transatlantic cable as closely as possible, not only in length, but also because subterranean lines closely resembled submarine cables in their electrical properties. These underground cables were already in commercial use, so that Morse and his ‘active and agreeable collaborators’ had to conduct their

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scientific expedition, they were sure England was going to profit by it to our injury. So now there were those who felt that in this submarine cable England was literally crawling under the sea to get some advantage of the United States. But any idea of taking the line directly to the

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armour the whole cable, the 2,200 miles of line, to be completed by the end of June 1857, were split between the two leading submarine cable-makers, R.S. Newall of Birkenhead, and Kuper & Co. of Greenwich, which became Glass, Elliot & Co. during the course of the contract. These companies, both

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occasionally arisen between the mother country and her descendants’. Memories were fresh of the bloody and damaging Crimean War, for which Newall had made the submarine cable. Many were conscious that better transatlantic communications at that time might have brought the United States to the aid of Britain and France. As it

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and ambition for further efforts. But, readers were reminded, the maximum length of any section on that last line was a mere 300 miles. Long submarine cables were still seen as a very bad risk. In spite of all these grand plans, three years after the Atlantic failure there was little real

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hope for from government was guarantees to their shareholders, and these were conditional on the line being successfully laid. It was still thought that long submarine cables may not prove profitable, so that dividends needed to be assured. But a guarantee on those terms did nothing to address the main problem, that

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of Trade and the Atlantic Telegraph Co. Galton’s deliberations were seen as ‘the most valuable collection of facts, warnings, and evidence ever compiled concerning submarine cables’. Galton himself believed that if cables were reliable, government money would not be needed in any form, for private investors would take up the job

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lines. His committee met between December 1859 and September 1860, and in 1861 published a report with recommendations on the making, laying and working of undersea cables. During the course of his enquiry, Galton interviewed most of the leading submarine telegraph engineers of the time. He collected evidence about the abortive attempts

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gutta percha to be a generally better insulator than any other compound or mixture. The young engineer could also suggest ways of avoiding faults in submarine cables by improvements in manufacture and laying, and how to mend them when they arose. The versatile Jenkin had also been investigating Thomson’s theory, the

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success. This also satisfied one of Galton’s complaints about the arrangements in 1857. And who better to shoulder a substantial part of the burden? Submarine cable companies possessed the technical insight to understand just how far risks had decreased, and how lucrative the telegraph company shares might turn out to be

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in the field. The Gutta Percha Co. had in the previous decade made over 9,000 miles of insulated wire for the inner cores of submarine cables. Glass & Elliot, their main customer, had made and laid more than 6,500 miles of underwater cable. The merger produced a completely integrated cable-making

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himself, like Cyrus Field, had flirted with personal ruin by gambling almost everything on the Atlantic cable. He went on to found a string of submarine cable companies until he, Gooch and other associates controlled telegraphs stretching from Britain across the Far East and Australasia. Porthcurno, an isolated sandy cove in the

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

by Simon Winchester  · 27 Oct 2009  · 522pp  · 150,592 words

the well-fed Justice—I could describe how the sea eventually became a sea of laws and commerce, and how tramp steamers and liners and submarine cables and jet aircraft then crossed and recrossed it in an infinite patchwork designed for the attainment of profit and comfort. In the Sixth Age, that

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North America to Europe: it was a mere 1,600 miles from the harbor opening at St. John’s to the cliffs of Connemara. An undersea cable—for such had already been invented in Europe: a telegraph cable had been laid between Britain and France in August 1850, and soon afterward others

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, J. M. W., 197–98 Tuvalu Islands, 412n Typhoon (book), 205 Typhoons, 423n U-boats, German, 261–66, 268–70 Uluburun archaeology site, 64–65 Undersea cables. See Cables, undersea Undersea oil exploration, 403–4 Undertow (painting), 198–99 Union Castle passenger liners, 186 United Nations, 176, 372n United States air transport

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power

by Jacob Helberg  · 11 Oct 2021  · 521pp  · 118,183 words

Road project.”32 All of these efforts amount to a bewildering mix of corporate deal-making and state-sponsored extortion. They traverse a tangle of undersea cables, next-generation wireless networks, and global supply chains. But broadly speaking, we can break China’s back-end strategy for dominating the Internet into four

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to a country’s Internet system. “People think that data is in the cloud, but it’s not,” says Jayne Stowell, who negotiates Google’s submarine cables. “It’s in the ocean.”65 Roughly a century and a half after that first copper connection under the English Channel, there are around 400

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of the world’s communications.68 And China is well on its way to controlling many of them. * * * The British company that laid that first undersea cable in 1850 still exists. In 2008, its successor entity, Global Marine, formed a joint venture with a company that will sound very familiar—a subsidiary

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connect the United States and northern Europe.III It’s part of the nearly $40 billion that Facebook and Google invested in network infrastructure like undersea cables in 2018 alone.70 But as China’s wealth and influence have grown, Chinese companies have joined the undersea game. Over the past decade, Huawei

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) to block a Huawei cable between Sydney and the Solomon Islands and (unsuccessfully) to stymie another deal between Huawei and Papua New Guinea. “Given that undersea cables carry the bulk of the world’s telecommunications data,” says William Evanina, the former director of the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center, “safeguarding

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of a sweeping new national security law on Hong Kong, the Department of Justice urged the Federal Communications Commission to scuttle an 8,000-mile undersea cable between Hong Kong and the United States—a joint project between Facebook, Google, and Pacific Light, the Hong Kong subsidiary of a Chinese conglomerate. One

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, it’s redirected to the landing station at Redondo Beach, on the Pacific coast, where it might enter a number of trans-Pacific cables. As undersea cables make landfall, they link up with so-called terrestrial cables in the ground. Our email can travel via underground fiber-optic cables or along the

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vacuum of the cosmos, China’s back-end dominance quietly grows. Having zipped across the United States via underground fiber-optic cables, your email reenters undersea cables on the Pacific coast. Most likely, it travels along the Unity/EAC-Pacific cable, built in 2010 by Telstra, Google, Singtel, and Time dotCom. It

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Secure 5G.145 A few months later, the State Department launched a Clean Network program to encourage friendly governments to protect back-end infrastructure like undersea cables and cell carriers.146 The 2021 National Defense Authorization Act included new restrictions on the sourcing of critical defense technologies from China,147 as policymakers

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to Ireland, Denmark, and Norway. It is, for my money, the best Irish-Jersey collaboration since Bruce Springsteen. IV. While China has sought to control undersea cables, Russia has appeared more interested in sabotaging them. In recent years, Russian submarines have stepped up their activity near cable routes. V. It should be

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any votes.)86 Any one of these moves could upend an election. And because this manipulation would take place on the back-end—through an undersea cable or with an implant stealthily inserted into a voting machine—it might prove far harder to identify than any fake news on the front-end

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government. Nor are many of the nation’s hospitals, utility companies, and banks. Virtually all of these systems are connected to back-end infrastructure—like undersea cables—owned and operated by the private sector, not the federal government. Yet an attack on any one of them could be incredibly destructive to the

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-over-chinese-mobile-giant-xiaomi-recording-millions-of-peoples-private-web-and-phone-use/?sh=707cb72d1b2a. 60 “South America-1 (Sam-1),” Submarine Cable Map, March 2001, https://www.submarinecablemap.com/#/submarine-cable/south-america-1-sam-1. 61 Andrew Blum, Tubes, e-book, 116, 125. 62 “Internet Exchange Points,” Data Center Map, https

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, March 10, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/10/technology/internet-cables-oceans.html. 66 “Submarine Cable 101,” TeleGeography, https://www2.telegeography.com/submarine-cable-faqs-frequently-asked-questions. 67 “Submarine Cable Map,” Submarine Cable Map, https://www.submarinecablemap.com/#/submarine-cable/seamewe-3. 68 Jeremy Page, Kate O’Keeffe, and Rob Taylor, “America’s Undersea Battle With

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,” Military Cyber Affairs, 2018, https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/mca/vol3/iss1/7/. 75 Winston Qiu, “Global Marine Group Fully Divests Stake in Huawei Marine Networks,” Submarine Cable Networks, June 6, 2020, https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/vendors/huawei-marine/global-marine-completes-sale-of-30-stake-in-huawei-marine-networks-for-85

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://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/first-detailed-public-map-us-internet-infrastructure-180956701/. 79 Winston Qiu, “China-Myanmar International (CMI) Terrestrial Cable Launches for Service,” Submarine Cable Networks, November 15, 2014, https://www.submarinenetworks.com/news/china-myanmar-international-cmi-terrestrial-cable-launches-for-service. 80 “Terrestrial Cable Resource,” China Mobile International

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation

by Jon Gertner  · 15 Mar 2012  · 550pp  · 154,725 words

tall, thoughtful, experimental physicist named Oliver Buckley who had spent much of his career at the Labs trying to address the special problems that affected “submarine” cable—that is, cable that went under water, connecting islands to the mainland, and was susceptible to a range of stresses that didn’t affect ordinary

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. For burying wire, the men in Chester had to develop new processes involving special tractors they invented and splicing techniques. Other Labs engineers focused on undersea cables, which required not only special materials and techniques but special ships, outfitted with enormous spools of cable in their massive holds, that could lay the

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needed to help design impermeable underwater cables, for example, one possibility was gutta-percha. But gutta-percha had drawbacks, including its extreme expense. For an undersea cable to Catalina Island, off the coast of California, the Labs’ chemists began looking for an alternative. Natural rubber was considered too soft in its pure

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—that is, to “vulcanize” it—the men had to address the problem that sulfur corrodes copper and would undoubtedly degrade the vital wires within the undersea cable. Only after the chemists determined that they could purify the rubber in a complex manner and then create fine silica flour as an insulator could

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dashes back and forth between Canada and Ireland. And in the decades after, engineers figured ingenious ways to increase the speed and capacity of other submarine cables. By the early 1900s, overseas telegraph communications had become a lucrative business. Human voices were different than telegraph signals. Carried by copper wire, the telephone

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1950s there were sixteen radio channels operating between the continents. These were relatively cheap to operate (and certainly less expensive than a 2,200-mile undersea cable, which was projected to cost about $42 million, or roughly $340 million in today’s dollars). But overseas radio had one ineradicable fault: Weather and

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was, this was not acceptable. At the same time, he noted, there was an obvious and unique answer: Figure out a way to make an undersea cable with repeaters spaced every forty miles or so, and then figure out a way to make it work for twenty years without leaks or interruption

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the time Kelly began planning an undersea cable with British phone engineers in 1953, a small library already existed about what would and would not work. In the years following World War II, the Labs had tested various designs for undersea repeaters on shorter routes—notably a submarine cable that successfully connected Key West

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put it in July 1961, to install “the great cable in space.” Satellites offered an alternative to the increasingly burdened underseas cables; more important, they could carry live television, which the current underseas cables could not. Within a decade, some economists predicted, orbiting relays could be a billion-dollar-a-year business.31 “We

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reliability, that might befall AT&T’s plans for a large-scale relay business. The complexity of the project was easily on par with the undersea cable, but the time frame for development was much faster, making the task even more difficult. Nothing in the satellite could be allowed to fail, moreover

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, for as hard as it was to repair an undersea cable, it would be impossible, in a world that had yet to send a man into space, to fix a satellite. O’Neill, the project manager

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” of work to create and used tens of thousands of transistors. Its complexity dwarfed that of other previous Bell Labs undertakings such as the transatlantic undersea cable. ESS, as Fred Kappel, the chairman of AT&T, pointed out at its opening in Succasunna, “was the largest single research and development project in

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that goal been achieved? There were now cables and microwave links and electronic switching stations that connected all Americans; there were likewise satellite links and undersea cables that connected the country to the rest of the world. At Bell Labs, Bill Baker, though loath to concede that a mature industry like his

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in how much information could be sent over fiber optic cables, which were beginning to connect not only regions of the country but also, through undersea cables, the continents. Many of the innovations that emerged from the Labs during this period would never become familiar to Americans in the way that communications

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paid by phone subscribers, which effectively allowed the organization to function much like a national laboratory. Bell Labs managers knew they could support projects—the undersea cable, for example, or cellular telephony—that might require decades of work. The funding stream also assured the managers that they could consistently support educational programs

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, 1958. The memo suggested that a satellite system “at best … would probably yield barely acceptable transmission performance as contrasted with the excellent performance obtainable with submarine cable. … The satellite system would be a major undertaking. With so many uncertainties in the picture no accurate estimate of research and development cost can be

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded

by Simon Winchester  · 1 Jan 2003  · 582pp  · 136,780 words

condition, which an event like Krakatoa did much to unsettle. The communications technology of the time, for example – the advances of telegraphy, the building of undersea cables, the flourishing of news agencies – ensured that the world's more advanced peoples learned about the eruption within moments of its happening. But at the

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of the day, ‘so gutta-percha, the very substance it demanded, was discovered.’) By 1865 the India Rubber, Gutta Percha & Telegraph Works Company was producing submarine cables as fast as the world was able to connect itself, and they were happily transmitting The converted warship Agamemnon laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable

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Clementine moored in Folkestone Harbour and connected to a boat two miles away, with a message successfully sent between the two. Since that time the undersea cable had become fixed in the public consciousness. Alfred, Lord Tennyson had written a hymn to the romance of the idea of coded voices hurrying along

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. Hush! Men talk to-day o'er the waste of the ultimate slime, And a new Word runs between: whispering, ‘Let us be one!’ The undersea cable connecting Singapore with London, after passing first by land in those days to Penang, crossed the Bay of Bengal to Madras, hopscotched across India and

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) Gilbert, J. S., and Sparks, R. S. J., The Physics of Explosive Volcanic Eruptions (London, Geological Society of London, 1998) Haigh, K. R., Cableships and Submarine Cables (London, Adlard Coles, 1968) Hall, R., and Blundell, D. J. (eds.), Tectonic Evolution of Southeast Asia (London, Geological Society of London, 1996) Hamilton, Warren, Tectonics

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–39, 240 the effects 241–61 the experiences 261–321 death statistics 5, 313 telegraphy 5, 7, 28n, 146, 167,184–7, 192–4, 215 undersea cables 5, 6, 184, 187, 189 lack of geological knowledge at the time 5–6 religious fears 6 and birth of global village 6–7 impact

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future

by Ben Tarnoff  · 13 Jun 2022  · 234pp  · 67,589 words

it—neither is it a place untouched by the past. It is entangled with history, and often in quite literal ways. One way is infrastructural. Submarine cables like MAREA, writes the scholar Nicole Starosielski, frequently follow “the contours of earlier networks.” Installing underwater lines is expensive, and it’s safer to follow

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have a nationwide ISP with Google Fiber—tech companies are pushing aggressively into the backbone market. In particular, they are investing in the fiber-optic submarine cables that line the floors of the world’s oceans and form the internet’s global arteries. Content providers like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft now

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enlarged further by acquiring the thousands of miles of unused “dark” fiber buried across the country, and extended overseas by taking a stake in a submarine cable. This may seem impractical, even utopian. It’s one thing to defend and extend community networks, quite another to storm the fortresses lying upstream. But

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with the very large mouth is the pelican eel. x, There are many such arteries … MAREA: “MAREA,” Submarine Cable Networks, submarinenetworks.com; Winston Qiu, “AWS Acquires a Fiber Pair on MAREA Cable System on IRU Basis,” Submarine Cable Networks, January 21, 2019. x, MAREA is a reminder … “Civilization …”: John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of

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undersea bandwidth: Adam Satariano, “How the Internet Travels Across Oceans,” New York Times, March 10, 2019. Google building its own undersea cables: Jameson Zimmer, “Google Owns 63,605 Miles and 8.5% of Submarine Cables Worldwide,” Broadband-Now, September 12, 2018. 30, The proponents of a … “Innovation, expanded …”: The “Framework for Global Electronic Commerce

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, But state spying, censorship, and shutdowns … NSA tapping fiber-optic cables: Craig Timberg, “NSA Slide Shows Surveillance of Undersea Cables,” Washington Post, July 10, 2013, and Olga Khazan, “The Creepy, Long-Standing Practice of Undersea Cable Tapping,” The Atlantic, July 16, 2013. 65, The post office was the first … Postal confidentiality: Anuj C. Desai

House of Huawei: The Secret History of China's Most Powerful Company

by Eva Dou  · 14 Jan 2025  · 394pp  · 110,159 words

the development of missiles and weapons of mass destruction.[37] * * * — In 2007, Huawei leveled up into the big leagues when it launched two exotic offerings: submarine cables and managed services. These product areas might have been obscure to the general consumer, but they reflected that Huawei had arrived at an elite level

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in the networking world. Submarine cables, the pipes that carry some 99 percent of the world’s internet traffic, form the backbone of the global telecommunication network. While people tend to

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with the UK’s Global Marine Systems.[41] Guo Ping, who was now Huawei’s chief strategic officer, was named the chairman of the new submarine cable venture,[42] called Huawei Submarine Networks. The joint-venture company was soon bidding for projects like an undersea fiber-optic cable to connect Kenya and

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absorbed the strongest US player, Lucent, a year earlier amid a wave of industry consolidation. But Huawei kept bidding, and pretty soon it began winning submarine cable projects. In 2007, Huawei also began selling managed services, a comprehensive service offering pioneered by Western companies like Ericsson. If a customer opted for managed

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soften its image overseas and gain acceptance in markets that were otherwise hard to crack. Smartphones were more innocuous than radio antennae, surveillance cameras, and submarine cables. Even as US officials were sounding the alarm over Huawei’s Sprint bid, Best Buy outlets across America began carrying Huawei-branded Android tablets.[25

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some of Huawei’s own engineers stayed behind. The company had mobile and landline networks across Libya and also had an ongoing contract for a submarine cable.[7] “Huawei might be the only foreign company remaining there,” a Chinese newspaper reported.[8] Interviewed by local press in late February, the wife of

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global cell-phone location data every day. He revealed that with the help of telecommunications operators, the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, were tapping undersea cables carrying intercontinental phone calls and internet traffic. He alleged that the NSA had monitored phone conversations of dozens of world leaders and bugged Cisco routers

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Club. This lavish spending would not be a waste. Indeed, it would help Huawei achieve a pretty incredible transformation. A company that hawked telephone switches, undersea cables, and surveillance gear to dictators and strongmen was being reborn in soft focus as a fun and fashionable brand. In Huawei’s early days, Ren

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of the Trump administration’s multipronged attack. Ren made the bitter decision to cut off some limbs. The first to go was the company’s undersea cable joint venture, Huawei Marine Systems Co. The unit had put Huawei in the business of carrying the world’s data between continents, in competition with

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Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. Huawei Marine Systems had laid some thirty-one thousand miles of undersea cable over ninety projects. But with all the geopolitical pressure, it was hard for Huawei Marine Systems to do business. Huawei announced that it was selling

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networking business for eighteen months. 2007: Huawei begins selling “managed services,” whereby it helps run customers’ networks for a fee. May 2007: Huawei enters the submarine cable market with the launch of Huawei Submarine Networks, a joint venture with the UK’s Global Marine Systems. July 2007: The FBI interviews Ren Zhengfei

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to take “all appropriate measures.” The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security announces sanctions on Huawei. June 2019: Huawei decides to sell its undersea cable subsidiary, Huawei Marine Systems, to a Chinese buyer. January 20, 2020: Meng Wanzhou’s extradition hearing begins in Vancouver. Second quarter 2020: For the first

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-pressure generators, 33, 33–36, 369 Al-Ahram, 310 Albania, 240 Alcatel, 105, 109, 381 Iraq and, 147 Lucent joint venture, 168, 203, 211, 250 submarine cable, 168 Algeria, 234 Alouette Correctional Centre for Women, 291, 301 Amerilink, 197–98 Ametek, 27, 34 Android, 134, 202, 303–4, 329, 346–47 Annan

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, 238–39, 352 Cisco, 105, 224 Great Firewall, 188, 330 Huawei patent lawsuit, 146, 149–53, 155, 211, 375 NSA and Snowden leaks, 241–42 submarine cable, 168 Cisco Systems Inc. v. Huawei Technologies, 149–53, 155, 211, 375 Citibank, 235 CITIC Group, 140 Claflin, Bruce, xxi, 152–53 Clancy, Charles, 169

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internship at Huawei, 47, 370 at Mobile World Congress, 242 Nortel and, 161, 197 rotating CEO, 211–12, 340, 378, 382 South Korea protests, 253 submarine cable venture, 168 supervisory board chairman, 340–41 US sanctions, 302 Gutiérrez, Luis, 224 H H3C, 170–72, 376 Handelsblatt, 310 Han Xin, 150 Hao Chunmin

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Sekkei, 260 Nixon, Richard, 24 Noah’s Ark Lab, 243, 265–66 Nokia, 105, 134, 141, 211, 235, 250, 268, 326 Huawei and, 152, 325 submarine cable, 168 Nortel, 59, 64, 170, 211, 330 bankruptcy of, 250, 268 bribery, 83 Huawei merger talks, 161, 196–97, 341 mobile and networks, 105, 195

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Stecklow, Steve, 231–32 steelmaking, 9–10 Steinmann, Eric, 155 Stone Group, 32, 50–51, 56–57, 70, 119–20, 349–50 Subler, Jason, 236 submarine cables, 167–68, 202, 206, 376 Sudan, 278 Suffolk, John, 209, 241, 330–31 suicide, 14, 125, 136–37, 175–77 Sunday Communications, 149, 154 Sun

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace

by Ronald J. Deibert  · 13 May 2013  · 317pp  · 98,745 words

the same type of cables that Shakarian accidentally unearthed traverse the world’s lakes and oceans, and bind cyberspace together in a very material sense. Undersea cables are one of the links that connect today’s cyberspace to the late Industrial Revolution. The first such cables were laid in the late nineteenth

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exchange to be discerned across small bodies of water like the English Channel, but over time innovations in electronics and protective cable sheathings allowed the undersea cable industry to flourish. (This growth led to a dramatic increase in international telephone calls, and a new market for the sap of gutta-percha trees

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the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and major bodies of water like the Mediterranean Sea. Due to the staggering costs involved, companies often share the same undersea cable trenches and sometimes competing companies even share the same protective sheathing. This makes those trenches highly vulnerable to major disruption. In a May 2012 article

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the ocean floor, but seismic data didn’t support this conjecture. Whatever the cause, such cuts to cables are fairly routine: Even in their trenches, undersea cables are pushed to and fro by currents and constantly rub against a rough seafloor. In the case of the 2008 Mediterranean incident, the damage was

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not restored until a French submarine located the severed cables and brought them to the surface for repair. Prior to the introduction of fibre optics, undersea cables were occasionally wiretapped by attaching instruments that collect radio frequency emitted outside the cables. During the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet

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. Specially trained divers from the USS Halibut left the submarine in frigid waters at a depth of 120 metres and wrapped tapping coil around the undersea cables at signal repeater points, where the emissions would be strongest. Tapes containing the recordings were delivered to NSA headquarters, and were found by analysts to

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. and other signals intelligence agencies have capabilities to tap undersea fibre-optic cables by cutting into them and collecting information through specifically designed splitters. • • • Like undersea cables, satellites illustrate the fragile nature of cyberspace. In 2009, a defunct and wayward Russian satellite collided with an Iridium low Earth orbit satellite at a

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, and eating “way too much barbecue.” At roughly the same time, thousands of miles away, two separate freak accidents resulted in the severing of four submarine cables to the African continent, shutting off connectivity to at least nine countries. Ten years ago, there was virtually no Internet access in Africa outside of

Your Computer Is on Fire

by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip  · 9 Mar 2021  · 661pp  · 156,009 words

subject matter and case studies, ranging from human-in-the-loop content moderation to Bitcoin mining, from mobile banking platforms to game design, and from undersea cable networks to keyboard interfaces, among many other examples. At the same time, the volume does not aspire to be a “conspectus” on computing and new

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, and capacity of the internet than the organizations that prop it up. Not the users. Not the visionary network designers. Other networked organizations—from the undersea cable owners to service providers to big data brokers to data aggregators—have gained the most. While surely not all organizations intend to exploit people, it

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the world’s telecommunications system commands the world,” argues historical geographer Peter Hugill.6 He traces the ways in which the power of British colonial submarine cable networks was eclipsed by post–World War II American communications satellites. He observed in 1999: “Just as American radio communications challenged the British cable ‘monopoly

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the 1990s, observing that, in Eick and his collaborator’s maps, “the lines of Internet traffic look more like beacons in the night than, say, undersea cables, satellite relays, or fiber-optic cables.” Harpold argued that although genuinely innovative in their techniques of handling large data sets, these late-twentieth-century internet

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such terrible images with which to begin a conversation about the operation of the internet? Tubes summon up an image not far from the actual undersea cables that really do undergird nearly speed-of-light communication. Although Stevens’s tubes seemed drawn from an industrial-era playbook, fiber optics, which enabled speed

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surveillance, which spurred many nations to start ocean-spanning cable projects, hoping to circumvent US networks. Undersea cable technology is not new; in the mid-nineteenth century, a global telegraph network depended on them. In the 1850s, undersea cables were made of copper, iron, and gutta-percha (a Malaysian tree latex introduced to the

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coaxial cables with vacuum tube amplifier repeaters. By the late twentieth century, they were fiber optics. By 2015, 99 percent of international data traveled over undersea cables, moving information eight times faster than satellite transmission.19 Communication infrastructure has looked rather like tubes for a century and a half. Infrastructural narratives had

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allegations that Rousseff was embarking on a socialist plan to “balkanize” the internet. Al Jazeera reported that Brazil was in the process of laying more undersea cable than any other country, and encouraging the domestic production of all network equipment, to preclude the hardware “backdoors” that the NSA was reported to be

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Chicago Press, 1990), 129. 21. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 22. “A giant undersea cable makes the Internet a split second faster,” CNN Money (February 30, 2012). On remediated metaphors in the digital world, see Jay David Bolter and Richard

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or more. All data from consulting firm Terabit, reported by Economic Times (April 2012), http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-04-15/news/31342442_1_undersea-cable-submarine-cables-fibre. 30. J. P. Singh, Leapfrogging Development? The Political Economy of Telecommunications Restructuring (Binghamton: State University of New York Press, 1999). 31. Bill Woodcock, “Brazil

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of” the internet. With rising demand for ever higher bandwidth, the internet has increasingly become a physical infrastructure project in its own right, requiring dedicated undersea cables, fiber-optic landlines, and server farms to handle exponentially increasing traffic—but telephone, TV cable, and cellular telephony, all originally installed as part of other

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work in large parts of the world that their collapse would represent a catastrophe. Further, these firms have invested substantially in physical systems, such as undersea cables surrounding the African continent.22 As Nathan Ensmenger shows in this volume, “the cloud” is really a factory: not just virtual but also physical and

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Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook,” New Media & Society 10 (2016). 22. Yomi Kazeem, “Google and Facebook Are Circling Africa with Huge Undersea Cables to Get Millions Online,” Quartz Africa (July 1, 2019), https://qz.com/africa/1656262/google-facebook-building-undersea-internet-cable-for-africa/. 23. Gary Cook

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early computing leader, 138 empire, 381 industrial technology, 221, 327 Ministry of Technology, 150 NGO (nongovernmental organization) networks, 324 Shirley, Stephanie “Steve,” 143–147, 146f Submarine cable networks, 93 United Kingdom (cont.) women programmers, 2, 139–147, 151–153, 162, 367, 383 women programmers and empire, 147–148, 152–153 World War

The Emperor's New Road: How China's New Silk Road Is Remaking the World

by Jonathan Hillman  · 28 Sep 2020  · 388pp  · 99,023 words

-generation wireless networks, Chinese firms are rapidly connecting the world’s next-generation markets, as Chapter 9 explains. In East Africa, Chinese firms are laying underseas cables, equipping cities with surveillance cameras, and building wireless networks. On Maslow’s hierarchy of digital needs, network security is secondary to cost, positioning China’s

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is less expensive and more practical.112 Huawei representatives point out that it will allow Pakistanis to access Chinese content more quickly, and by avoiding undersea cables, the route makes espionage from neighboring countries other than China more difficult.113 Unlike the proposed pipeline, the fiber-optic cable is less vulnerable to

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on China’s “digital silk road.” Globally, there are about 380 active underseas cables, which carry the vast majority of international data. Data from cell phones, for example, is sent to a tower and then onward across terrestrial and submarine cables. These cables will only become more important with the arrival of 5G and

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, almost exclusively in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. A decade later, Huawei Marine, an offshoot of the Chinese tech giant Huawei, was involved with ninety submarine cables around the world. Under Made in China 2025, Xi Jinping’s signature policy for taking the commanding heights of high-tech manufacturing, Beijing aims to

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to untangle, as one flagship project illustrates. Beginning with its name, the Pakistan and East Africa Connecting Europe, or PEACE, cable seems relatively benign. The underseas cable was originally named the Pakistan and East Africa Express but was rebranded after the addition of France as a landing point. It is slated to

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developing military-grade cable technology.8 The PLA gave it an innovation award in 2015, and the following year, they formed a partnership to research underseas cables.9 A separate company was formed to oversee the PEACE cable, common practice in an industry that often relies on forming consortia-style partnerships for

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become a Chinese naval facility, as Chapter 7 described, to Djibouti, home to China’s first military base. Ethiopia, which is landlocked and connects to underseas cables landing in Djibouti, will access the cable as well. It will also land in Mombasa, Kenya, home to a major port that Kenya’s auditor

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to part with control of Djibouti Telecom, its state-owned telecommunications company. The company runs Djibouti’s cellular and internet networks as well as two underseas cable landing stations, where eleven international and regional fiber-optic cables converge and more are planned in the future.25 If China has a wish list

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, “What We Do: Berbera-Somaliland,” accessed February 4, 2020, https://www.dpworld.com/what-we-do/our-locations/Middle-East-Africa/Berbera/somaliland. 25. TeleGeography, “Submarine Cable Map,” Primetrica Inc., accessed February 4, 2020, https://www.submarinecablemap.com/#/landing-point/djibouti-city-djibouti. 26. Bolton, “Remarks on the Trump Administration’s New

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman  · 17 Jul 2017  · 415pp  · 114,840 words

. Yet there were high costs to shouting. In the best case, it was still expensive and energy-hungry. In the worst case, as with the undersea cable, it could destroy the medium of communication itself. Third, what hope there was of doing better lay in investigating the boundaries between the hard world

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of human communication, those questions were posed with urgency and rigor just then because the answers had suddenly grown exceptionally valuable. In the profusion of undersea cables, transcontinental radio calls, pictures sent by phone line, and moving images passing through the air, our sudden skill at communicating had outstripped our knowledge of

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simply conventional wisdom that noise had to be endured. The means of mitigating noise had hardly changed, in principle, since Wildman Whitehouse fried the great undersea cable. Transmitting information, common sense said, was like transmitting power. Expensively and precariously adding more power remained the best answer—shouting through the static, as it

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; steam engines, and found the world to be a machine processing heat; information networks—switching circuits and data transmission and half a million miles of submarine cable connecting the continents—and found the world in their image, too. * * * I. Because you’re unconsciously aware of those rules, you’ve already recognized “pineapple

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down

by Tom Standage  · 27 Nov 2018  · 215pp  · 59,188 words

aircraft than birds What is the point of spam e-mail? Why the police should wear body cameras Why tech giants are laying their own undersea cables Game theory: sport and leisure Why tennis players grunt Why board games are so popular in Nigeria How drones can keep beaches safe from sharks

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worries are not insignificant. But the evidence is mounting that the usefulness of such cameras outweighs the drawbacks. Why tech giants are laying their own undersea cables In September 2017 Microsoft and Facebook announced the completion of a 6,600km (4,100-mile) cable stretching from Virginia Beach, Virginia, to Bilbao, Spain

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that it makes more sense to lay their own dedicated cables. This has led to a boom in new undersea cable systems. The Submarine Telecoms Forum, an industry body, reckons that 100,000km of submarine cable was laid in 2016, up from just 16,000km in 2015. TeleGeography, a market-research firm, reckons that

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spent on such cable projects between 2016 and 2018, five times as much as in the previous three years. Plumbing the depths Active and planned submarine cable systems owned* by: October 2017 Source: TeleGeography *In full or in part Game theory: sport and leisure Why tennis players grunt It has become common

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40 Europe craft breweries 97–8 summer holidays 239–40 see also individual countries Everson, Michael 216 exorcism 36–7 F Facebook augmented reality 182 undersea cables 193 FANUC 171, 172 Federer, Roger 197 feminism, and birth rates 81–2 fertility rates see birth rates festivals Christmas 246–7 Christmas music 243

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video games and unemployment 169 Mexico avocados 89, 90 gay and lesbian rights 73 murder rate 44, 45 microbreweries 97–8 Microsoft HoloLens 181–2 undersea cables 193 migration, and birth rates 81–3 mining diamonds 13–14 sand 7–8 mobile phones Africa 175–6 5G 173–4 Mocan, Naci 56

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Arabia 19 Scotland, witch-hunting 25–6, 27 Scott, Keith Lamont 191 Scrabble (board game) 199 seas Arctic sea ice 147–8 salty 11–12 undersea cables 193–4 secularism, and birth rates 81–2 Seles, Monica 197 self-driving cars 177–8 Serbia 222 Serbo-Croatian 221–2 Sevilla, Almudena 75

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sport football clubs 211–12 football transfers 203–4 grunting in tennis 197–8 Sri Lanka 118 Star Wars 208 sterilisation 65–6 Strasbourg 26 submarine cables 193–4 Sudan 40 suicide-bombers 15–16 summer holidays 239–40 Sutton Trust 22 Sweden Christmas music 243, 244 gay and lesbian rights 73

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Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin 183 Turkey 151 turkeys 33 Turkmenistan 6 U Uber 128 and drink-driving 179–80 Uganda 40 Ulaanbaatar 42–3 Uljarevic, Daliborka 221 undersea cables 193–4 unemployment 169–70 Unicode 215–16 United Arab Emirates and Somaliland 41 weapons purchases 19 United Kingdom see Britain United States and Argentine

Victorian Internet

by Tom Standage  · 1 Jan 1998

the operators at each end struggled to get the cable to work. The following year, another high-profile telegraphic venture, an attempt to build a submarine cable through the Red Sea to India funded by the British government, also ended in failure. This time, since it was public money that had been

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in for him, even though he had grave reservations about its design. He had already done a lot of theoretical work on the nature of submarine cables, and his measured, scientifically justified evidence to the public inquiry made mincemeat out of Whitehouse. Not only had Whitehouse made the conducting core too small

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one of the two cables got crushed by an iceberg and stopped working, it was repaired within weeks. Before long, the recovery and repair of undersea cables was regarded as commonplace. Another banquet was held for Morse at Delmonico's in New York in December 1868, where he was toasted for having

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petits bleux, after the blue color of the message forms. BY THE EARLY 1870s, the Victorian Internet had taken shape: A patchwork of telegraph networks, submarine cables, pneumatic tube systems, and messengers combined to deliver messages within hours over a vast area of the globe. New cables were being laid all over

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, say, London to Bombay and back took ten weeks. But within thirty years there were over 650,000 miles of wire, 3o,ooo miles of submarine cable, and 20,000 towns and villages were on-line—and messages could be telegraphed from London to Bombay and back in as little as four

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a moneymaker; but the more points there were on the network, the more useful it became. By the late 1860s, the telegraph industry, and the submarine cable business in particular, was booming—and every investor wanted a piece of the action. "There can be no doubt that the most popular outlet now

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, the farthest extremity of the Austrian network, to Varna on the Black Sea, and a British company was then contracted to lay a 340-mile submarine cable across to the Crimean peninsula. For the first time, French and British governments could communicate directly with commanders on a distant battlefield. This was further

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network. He was able to send to London an immediate report on the situation, which traveled via the Egyptian railway telegraph network and then by submarine cable. He then followed up with a more detailed report, in which he suggested that Marchand's forces, which were in fact comparable in strength to

The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970

by John Darwin  · 23 Sep 2009

of British expansion were progressively linked by a complex system of communication. From the 1840s onwards, this was provided by subsidised mail services, telegraph wires, undersea cables, an expanding rail network, fast passenger steamers and (in the twentieth century) imperial air routes. They catered for, and stimulated, the growing volume and frequency

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into Britain's pattern of trade and investment – a process accelerated by the cutting of the Suez Canal and the extension of the telegraph and submarine cable. But, as quickly became clear, the military foundations of the new British Raj also demanded a closer strategic connection, and imposed willy-nilly a general

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sustain the flow of migration, Britain's demographic imperialism. Last, but not least, it preserved Britain's lead in communications technology, especially the telegraph and undersea cables that made London (and Britain) the information hub of the world. But Britain's position in the new world economy could not be taken for

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4,000 miles and reached 10,000 miles in 1892.69 With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and the arrival of the submarine cable in 1872, Australia's long isolation seemed less forbidding. But Europe was still thirty days’ steaming away,70 and up to the 1890s most Australian

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

by Luke Harding  · 7 Feb 2014  · 266pp  · 80,018 words

’s End. Thousands of miles long, the fibre-optic cables are operated by big private telecoms firms, often in consortia. The landing points of these submarine cables are so important that the American Department of Homeland Security lists them as critical American national infrastructure (according to leaked US diplomatic messages). In this

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the planet’s burgeoning data flows. Unsurprisingly, given their history, both countries’ spy agencies wanted to exploit their good luck and tap into all these submarine cables in order to eavesdrop. As technology changed, the two organisations had successively intercepted radio traffic, then microwave beams and ultimately satellite links. It was logical

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their own citizens and keep a lid on dissent. The most vociferous reaction came from Brazil. In October, Rousseff announced plans to build a new undersea cable linking South America with Europe. This would, in theory, shut out the US and make it harder for the NSA to siphon off Brazilian information

The Everything Blueprint: The Microchip Design That Changed the World

by James Ashton  · 11 May 2023  · 401pp  · 113,586 words

signal processor (DSP) chip, the TM320, translated sound and images from analogue into digital. TI’s first DSP customer put them in analogue repeaters in underseas cables, which were used to extend the distance a radio signal could travel. Then came IBM disk drives. But the company needed to find some high

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departing for Sussex University, returning every summer vacation and after graduating with a degree in electronic engineering. STC had a grand history, making telephone switchboards, undersea cables and early fibre optics for the nation. It was a major supplier to British Telecom and had benefited as the company upgraded its telephone exchanges

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians

by Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman  · 21 Mar 2017  · 441pp  · 113,244 words

, one lightbulb becomes a trillion lightbulbs, and one voice carried along a wire to the next room becomes a planet crisscrossed with telegraph lines and undersea cables. Ricardo cites an oft-repeated fact in his academic paper: “Up to 90 per cent of wastewater flows untreated into densely populated coastal zones contributing

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international law. It comprises, inter alia, both for coastal and non-coastal States: (1) Freedom of navigation; (2) Freedom of fishing; (3) Freedom to lay submarine cables and pipelines; (4) Freedom to fly over the high seas. * * * “Because international law promulgated by the United Nations [which codifies the major principles of international

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything

by Matthew Ball  · 18 Jul 2022  · 412pp  · 116,685 words

navigate international rights, geographic impediments, and cost/benefit analyses. As a result, many countries and major cities lack a direct connection. NYC has a direct undersea cable to France, but not to Portugal. Traffic from the United States can go directly to Tokyo, but reaching India requires jumping from one

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undersea cable to another on the Asian or Oceanian continent. A single cable could be laid from the United States to India, but it would need to

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cable over a seamount in international waters is simple compared to laying a cable over a private-public mountain range. Image 1. Undersea Cables A map of the nearly 500 submarine cables and 1,250 landing stations that enable the global internet. TeleGeography The phrase “internet backbone” might bring to mind a largely planned

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, 48–53, 64, 79–88, 95–96, 99–100, 230, 243, 248, 271, 305 network gateways, 130 rent-seeking and, 15, 299 3G networks, 243 undersea cables, 84–85, 85 Neuralink, 154 Neuromancer, 5–6, 8 Newsweek, 308 New World, 277 New York Times, xv, 4–5, 73, 224, 256 as an

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

by Paul Kingsnorth  · 23 Sep 2025  · 388pp  · 110,920 words

detailed personal information we freely volunteer them daily all over the web. These corporations operate via a global technological network of staggering power and complexity—undersea cables, orbiting satellites, monitoring devices in our homes and in our pockets, and, soon, web-connected streets, buildings and appliances, all monitoring us in real time

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long time to get here, but here at last we are, in the world which the ratio has built out of bits and bytes and undersea cables. ‘The prehistory of the computer’, writes Naydler, ‘is our history: it is the history of human consciousness. It is the history of the project to

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us

by James Ball  · 19 Aug 2020  · 268pp  · 76,702 words

of the stops along the way actually belong to the company I pay for my internet. But Twitter doesn’t actually own any of the undersea cables across the Atlantic, so is paying someone for its use, meaning that this route shows at least some money must change hands. That’s not

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.uk/news/technology-32884867 17https://www.statista.com/statistics/471264/iot-number-of-connected-devices-worldwide/ 18This stat comes from TeleGeography (https://www2.telegeography.com/submarine-cable-faqs-frequently-asked-questions) – their map of the main undersea internet cables is well worth a look: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ 2 THE CABLE GUYS

The Dream of Europe: Travels in the Twenty-First Century

by Geert Mak  · 27 Oct 2021  · 722pp  · 223,701 words

suck everything out of our phones and laptops,’ you hear people say in the Centrum Kafé. Russian submarines, for their part, fossick about near the undersea cables in the Arctic, making the Americans nervous in turn. In Kirkenes you look down from a great height on Berlin, Brussels, London and Rotterdam, all

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism

by Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias  · 19 Aug 2019  · 458pp  · 116,832 words

are describing represent massive concentrations of power. These companies currently exercise a hold over the infrastructure that makes social quantification possible; they control everything from undersea cables to satellites to the “last mile” architecture that delivers internet service to individuals. They also control the environments or platforms in which data is being

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replicated the mercantile routes established during historical colonialism,38 and colonial maps continued to exert their influence. For example, Britain forced companies that operated transatlantic submarine cables to use London as their connection hub (after World War I, the epicenter for global communications shifted from England to the United States).39 Ownership

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Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-Coloniality.” Cultural Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2007): 449–514. Miller, Ron. “Google’s Latest Undersea Cable Project Will Connect Japan to Australia.” Techcrunch, April 4, 2018. Mirowski, Philip. Machine Dreams. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Mitchell, Stacy. “Amazon Is Trying

The Great Firewall of China

by James Griffiths;  · 15 Jan 2018  · 453pp  · 114,250 words

the other end of the equation. In 2008, millions of users across the Middle East were cut off from servers in the US when several undersea cables were damaged by unknown causes.53 While that outage was accidental, the Xinjiang internet blackout the following year showed that the same effect could be

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Stanford white paper ‘How does the internet work’ and from TeleGeography’s maps of the physical internet. 51Submarine cable map at http://www.submarinecablemap.com/#/submarine-cable/asia-america-gateway-aag-cable-system 52See http://visitslo.com/ 53H. Timmons, ‘Ruptures call safety of internet cables into question’, International Herald Tribune, 4 February

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

by Sarah Wynn-Williams  · 11 Mar 2025  · 370pp  · 115,318 words

internet is on such a big scale—submarine cables, data centers—that it requires significant investment, planning, and execution. When Facebook started its major projects to get into China, it also started working with Google and a Chinese firm, Pacific Light Data Communication, to build an undersea cable that would land in China to

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support its Chinese operations. Facebook would be pioneering the first undersea cable to directly connect China and the US. It was clear there would be very significant risks that

Cuckoo's Egg

by Clifford Stoll  · 2 Jan 1989  · 440pp  · 117,978 words

crowded.” “You mean that people prefer cable to satellite links?” “Sure. Every time you connect through a satellite, there’s a quarter second delay. The undersea cables don’t slow down your messages so much.” “Who would care?” “People on the telephone, mostly,” Steve said. “Those delays make for jittery conversations. You

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.” “So if the phone companies try to route over the cables, who wants the satellites?” “Television networks, mostly. TV signals can’t be squeezed into submarine cables, so they grab the satellites. But fiber optics will change everything.” I’d heard of fiber optics. Running communications signals over strands of glass, instead

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

by Andrew Blum  · 28 May 2012  · 314pp  · 83,631 words

most important places. I visited those giant data warehouses, but many other types of places as well: the labyrinthine digital agoras where networks meet, the undersea cables that connect continents, and the signal-haunted buildings where glass fibers fill copper tubes built for the telegraph. Unless you’re one of the small

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figured I would have heard more. At the least, it would have occasionally become clogged or broken, bought or sold. As for international links, the undersea cables seemed mythic, like something out of Jules Verne. The Internet—other than as it appeared on my ever-present screen—was more conceptual than actual

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NAP in a bunker of a building in Pennsauken, ninety miles from New York, was because of the existing facility’s links to the transatlantic undersea cables that landed on the New Jersey shore; it was the gateway to Europe. The opening of the network access points also marked an important philosophical

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the depot: a convenient central point to string a cable from one router to another. And in particular, it’s a popular place for the undersea cables linking Asia and North America to install their network POPs, or “points of presence.” This is the place that makes “connect” a physical word. From

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I’d been reassured that on the Internet there’s always a distinct physical path, whether a single yellow fiber patch cord, an ocean-spanning undersea cable, or a bundle of fibers several-hundred thick. But whatever went on inside the router was invisible to the naked eye. What was the physical

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same number, and mostly the same networks, familiar from the other biggies. But a half dozen of these networks are of particular importance: the transatlantic undersea cables, which land at various points along the Long Island and New Jersey coasts, and then “home run” to 60 Hudson, where they connect with each

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users, but a horribly insufficient one. SAT-3 was a relatively low-capacity cable with only four strands of fiber, while the biggest long-distance undersea cables might have up to sixteen. Worse, its meager capabilities were further reduced by the needs of the eight countries SAT-3 connected before arriving in

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.” But for Alston the acceleration came with the arrival of an unfathomably long and skinny thing, a singular path across the bottom of the sea. Undersea cables are the ultimate totems of our physical connections. If the Internet is a global phenomenon, it’s because there are tubes underneath the ocean. They

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. Yet the basic principle of the cables is shockingly simple: light goes in on one shore of the ocean and comes out on the other. Undersea cables are straightforward containers for light, as a subway tunnel is for trains. At each end of the cable is a landing station, around the size

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come with more familiar images, like a ribbon of interstate, a length of train track, or a 747 parked expectantly at the airport gate. But undersea cables are invisible. They feel more like rivers than paths, containing a continuous flow of energy rather than the occasional passing conveyance. If the first step

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in visiting the Internet was to imagine it, then undersea cables always struck me as its most magical places. And only more so when I realized their paths were often ancient. With few exceptions

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, undersea cables land in or near classic port cities, places like Lisbon, Marseille, Hong Kong, Singapore, New York, Alexandria, Mumbai, Cyprus, or Mombasa. On a daily basis

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it may feel as if the Internet has changed our sense of the world; but undersea cables showed how that new geography was traced entirely upon the outlines of the old. For all that magic, my journey to see the cables began

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. But financially the project was an unmitigated disaster, perfectly timed for the 2003 low point of the technology industry. As the Englishmen who dominate the undersea cable industry liked to say, the capacity they’re selling is too often “cheap as chips.” Simon Cooper was Tata’s Englishman, with the job of

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, people begin to think about things like call centers, which are constantly hunting for the place with the lowest cost services. The demand springs up.” Undersea cables link people—in rich nations, first—but the earth itself always stands in the way. To determine the route of an

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undersea cable requires navigating a maze of economics, geopolitics, and topography. For example, the curvature of the planet makes the shortest distance between Japan and the United

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was cool. “It depends on the weather,” he said. “We’ll let you know.” In the meantime, I set out for the spiritual home of undersea cables. If the Internet’s newest links tended to settle in the corners of the map, the old ones concentrated in more familiar places, and in

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followed him in my car toward the landing stations. Immediately out of the valley we came upon what amounted to a High Street of the undersea cable world—a half-dozen stations lined up along the road. The first was disguised as a stone house and would have been unrecognizable as a

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wore jeans, a stylish cardigan, and black skater shoes. If the Internet exchange guys tended toward the nerdy, most at home behind their screens, the undersea cable people were more likely to be the type who wouldn’t hesitate walking into a sailors’ bar in a foreign port. And indeed, Paling started

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Times, March 11, 2007 (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article1496831.ece). 6: The Longest Tubes In human terms, the world of undersea cables is an intimate one, and many people happily shared their knowledge and opened their facilities. At Global Crossing—now Level 3—Kate Rankin championed my

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info. Then in Cornwall, Jol Paling shared his beautiful part of the world. The Porthcurno Telegraph Museum is an invaluable resource for the history of undersea cables; archivist Alan Renton became a friend in the valley. At Hibernia Atlantic, Bjarni Thorvardarson welcomed me in and Tom Burfitt gave a great tour. At

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. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), p. 159. In 2004, Tata paid $130 million: Ken Belson, “Tyco to Sell Undersea Cable Unit to an Indian Telecom Company,” New York Times, November 2, 2004 (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/02/business/02tyco.html). CEO Dennis Kozlowski

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which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use your e-book reader’s search tools. Abbate, Janet, 35–36, 54 AC-1 (underseas cable). See Atlantic Crossing-1 Adams, Henry, 143–44 Adams, Rick, 60 ADC, 97 Adelson, Jay DEC and, 76, 87, 88 at Digg, 72, 93 Equinix

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of, 132–33 as logical center of Internet, 147 peering and, 128, 130, 131 Qatar Telecom and, 139 routers at, 157 traffic at, 133–34 undersea cables and, 197 Witteman-Blum discussion about, 132–35 Amsterdam, The Netherlands Blum’s visit to, 148–56 data centers/storage near, 150–54 structure of

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New York City, 166, 172–73, 175, 176, 178 in Oregon, 252 PAIX and, 84 Tata as competition for, 196 Atlantic Crossing-1 “AC-1” (undersea cable), 202–3, 211–12, 216–17, 218 Auer, Jon, 21–25, 29–30, 61 Austin, Texas: NANOG meeting in, 119–23, 128–35, 157 Australia

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(BPA), 228, 234, 235, 237, 238, 249, 250–51 Boston, Massachusetts: history of Internet and, 50 Bowman, Katy, 244 Brin, Sergey, 69–70 Briston, England: undersea cables and, 197 British Telecom, 184, 185, 208–9, 210, 253 broadband bubble, 56, 89 Brocade, 121, 155, 157–58, 159–63, 188 Brown, Martin, 151

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and, 128, 130 routers at, 157, 161 security at, 140–41 structure of Internet and, 27 as symbol of infinity, 144 traffic at, 133–34 undersea cables and, 197 Diaz, Eddie, 166–71, 267 Digg, 72, 93 “digital divide,” 236 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), 52, 74–76, 86, 87, 88 Digital Realty

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Crossing, 125, 153, 183, 202–3, 208, 209–10, 253 Global Internet Geography “GIG” (TeleGeography), 14, 27 Global Switch, 183 globalization of “peering,” 125–26 undersea cables and, 197 Goldman Sachs, 261 Google Cerf at, 45 in China, 257 as content provider, 79 data centers/storage for, 229, 231, 234–35, 237

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, 75–76, 80 transformation from crossroads to depot of, 65–66 “Tysons Corner problem” at, 111 MAE-West (Metropolitan Area Exchange), 64, 83 Main One (undersea cable), 218 man-trap, Adelson’s, 93–94, 103 Manos, Michael, 232–35, 238, 239 maps of ARPANET, 49–50, 52 of backbone architecture of Internet

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, 266 peering and, 128 60 Hudson Street in, 171–74, 176 structure of Internet and, 27 32 Avenue of the Americas in, 171–80 as undersea cables port, 194, 199 New York University (NYU), 50 Newby, Hunter, 174 Ninth Avenue fiber highway (New York City), 164 Nipper, Arnold, 137–38, 140–43

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, 160 Orlowski, Frank, 133–34, 135, 145, 157 Osés, Mara Vanina, 7 Pacific Bell, 64, 84 Pacific DC Intertie, 228 Page, Larry, 69–70 PAIX, undersea cables, PAIX and, 78 Pakistan Telecom, 30 Paling, Jol, 208, 209, 210–15, 216, 267 Palo Alto, California Adelson-Troyer-Blum meeting in, 71–72, 73

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–71 Tyco Communications, 218, 219 Tyco Global Network, 195, 198, 199 “Tysons Corner problem,” 111 Tysons Corner, Virginia, 61–62, 88. See also MAE-East undersea cables AC-1, 202–3, 216–17, 218 and connecting to unconnected places, 197–98 globalization and, 193, 197 as important to Internet, 9 as invisible

Red November: Inside the Secret U.S.-Soviet Submarine War

by W. Craig Reed  · 3 May 2010  · 523pp  · 143,639 words

deep in the Sea of Okhotsk, a large body of water, surrounded by land, that from the air looked like a massive Russian lake. The undersea cable ran from the Petropavlovsk submarine base and missile-testing facilities on the Kamchatka Peninsula, down to Vladivostok, headquarters of the Soviet “Far East” Pacific Fleet

Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers

by Simon Winchester  · 27 Oct 2015  · 535pp  · 151,217 words

shallows were to be found out in the mid-ocean deeps. HMS Challenger, surveying the Atlantic in 1872 to find the optimal route for an undersea cable, found that depths in the middle of the ocean were many thousands of feet less than expected, and a century later, German oceanographers noticed that

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age

by David E. Sanger  · 18 Jun 2018  · 394pp  · 117,982 words

lead us back to the plans and intentions of the PRC.” The NSA saw an additional opportunity: As Huawei invested in new technology and laid undersea cables to connect its networking empire, the agency was interested in tunneling into key Chinese customers, including “high priority targets—Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kenya, Cuba.” In

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were only a few possible options. The NSA would have to hack in remotely from one of its bases around the world, physically tap the undersea cables themselves, or get cooperation from a foreign partner, such as the British. The most likely method was physically tapping the termination points in a country

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where the undersea cables came ashore. And since Google had not gotten around to encrypting the data that was “in transit” through these cables, merely getting into the network

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, Grosse said, had actually begun long before they saw the smiley-face diagram. As early as 2008, Google had been investing in consortiums that laid undersea cables. But sharing had its risks: The company was not fully in control of who else had access to the cables, and there was always the

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Operation Ivy Bells,” he said. Grosse was referring to the huge US intelligence project in the early 1970s to tap into the Soviet Navy’s undersea cables in the Sea of Okhotsk. At significant risk of discovery, the NSA had dispatched a submarine to wrap a secretly developed twenty-foot-long set

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member of the intelligence-industrial complex that ultimately won the Cold War. There was no shame in the revelation of the company’s role; the undersea cable in question was used by the Soviet military to communicate with subs carrying ICBMs aimed at American cities. Bell Labs had done what many Americans

Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time

by Clark Blaise  · 27 Oct 2000  · 240pp  · 75,304 words

later, and at great personal cost, he bravely rallied the informal commonwealth of overseas dominions against British communications monopolies, and succeeded in laying the worldwide, undersea cable. A thousand miles east of Toronto, in 1851, the Railway Minister of the Nova Scotia colony, Joseph Howe, ventured a prophecy that is almost eerie

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influences as from sturdy moral and social exempla? After the standardtime issues had been settled, Fleming spent the next twenty years perfecting a world-circling undersea cable that would link England instantaneously with all her distant colonies. He believed (and how could he not?) that intimate and immediate contact would spawn greater

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the calculation for any new enterprise, and London and Continental banks oversaw bond issues for projects that might have seemed fanciful only a generation earlier: undersea cables, new shipyards, new steel mills, new mining equipment; transcontinental railroads spanning Canada, South Africa, America, India; telegraphs down the African coast. The new technology ran

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engineering, or the Canadian Pacific Railway, he began working full-time on the two major projects of his life, world standard time, and the worldwide undersea cable. They were, of course, related endeavors—shrinking the world to the speed of new technology, one might say—although they involved distinctly different strategies and

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at least one of the chain, for Britain), with the Dutch in Indonesia, the Japanese, and the French in East and North Africa—wherever an undersea cable was forced to surface on foreign-held land. He entered cabinet-level conflicts in every “white” British colony on every continent, supporting autonomous forces against

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)

by Robert J. Gordon  · 12 Jan 2016  · 1,104pp  · 302,176 words

on January 8, 1815, three weeks after the Treaty of Ghent was signed to end the War of 1812. Before development of the telegraph and undersea cable, news traveled very slowly. But during the Civil War, the daily newspapers carried dispatches announcing the outcomes of battles mere hours after they occurred. The

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was ubiquitous in the east by 1855, the transcontinental telegraph debuted in late 1861, and after an abortive start in the late 1850s, a working undersea cable linking Britain and America was laid in 1866. Contemporary observers recognized the importance of the telegraph almost immediately. As early as 1847, the telegraph was

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had depended on differential access to information. A domestic financial transaction could be ordered and confirmed by 1890 in less than two minutes. Before the undersea cable, the six-week delay for a round-trip crossing from New York to London could lead to inefficient purchase and sale decisions for commodities and

GCHQ

by Richard Aldrich  · 10 Jun 2010  · 826pp  · 231,966 words

R1 1974 Cyprus invasion by Turkey 1974 US sigint bases in Turkey shut down Feb. 1975 Government Secure Speech Network cancelled Jul. 1975 Ivy Bells undersea cable-tapping operation begins using USS Halibut Aug. 1975 Work on Diego Garcia expansion begins 1975 GCHQ Mauritius station closed 1975 NSA takes delivery of its

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Istanbul 307, 309, 310, 316, 318 Italy 19, 44, 52, 96, 345, 452; Italian Cryptographic Bureau 54–5 ITT (telecoms company) 341, 342 Ivy Bells (undersea cable-tapping) 384 Jakarta (Indonesia) 167, 168 Japan 17, 29, 39, 40, 44, 65, 100, 110, 152, 445, 446 Jebb, Gladwyn 64 Jenkins, Roy 51 Johnson

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets

by Andy Kessler  · 13 Jun 2005  · 218pp  · 63,471 words

scattered across the Islands and was trying to figure out how to hook up a data network between them. It couldn’t afford to run undersea cable and modems were too slow, so they hit on the idea of using radio signals to transmit data. The problem was interference. Maui might transmit

2034: A Novel of the Next World War

by Elliot Ackerman and James Admiral Stavridis  · 15 Mar 2021  · 297pp  · 89,292 words

depths. “If the Americans detonate a nuclear weapon,” said Kolchak, “I don’t think the world will much care if we tamper with a few undersea cables.” He held Farshad in his gaze. “I also don’t think the world would say much if our troops seized a sliver of Poland, to

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stared at their thrashing dorsal fins. As if sensing Farshad’s confusion, he explained himself. “Those sharks are heading in the direction of the 10G undersea cables. They’re attracted to the electromagnetic energy. Those cables connect to the United States, and sharks have been known to chew through them. Their presence

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will give us deniability.” Destroying a few of the undersea cables would send a powerful message to the Americans, slowing internet across the country by as much as 60 percent, or so Farshad had been told

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Beijing to cross it. Which was what it seemed Beijing had now done, though not in the way anyone had anticipated. The cutting of the undersea cables and the resulting plunge into darkness was the demonstrable fact that, when discussed around the conference table, proved Beijing had crossed the red line. The

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the inside of his lip, tracing the outline of his boyhood scar. * * * 10:37 July 03, 2034 (GMT+2) Gdańsk Bay The destruction of the undersea cables was accepted with equanimity, if not a measure of outright enthusiasm, by Farshad’s old colleagues in the Revolutionary Guard Corps. Major General Mohammad Bagheri

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, “You above all others should know that today could have been avoided. You were on the bridge of the Rezkiy when the Russians sabotaged the undersea cables. The Americans never would have launched at Zhanjiang had that accident not occurred. That’s another word for you: accident.” Instead of three syllables Patel

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

by James Bridle  · 18 Jun 2018  · 301pp  · 85,263 words

are valid criticisms, and one way of interrogating the cloud is to look where its shadow falls: to investigate the sites of data centres and undersea cables and see what they tell us about the real disposition of power at work today. We can seed the cloud, condense it, and force it

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Mayor’s and coronation parades are now distributed through the network, and the galleries and places of worship have likewise migrated into data centres and undersea cables. We cannot unthink the network; we can only think through and within it. And we can listen to it, when it tries to speak to

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technological discovery, and that desire for the oncoming rush of the future, the head-down drive of forward movement. It’s resource extraction, fossil fuels, undersea cables, server farms, air conditioning, on-demand delivery, giant robots, and meat under pressure. It’s scale and subjugation, the pushing back of the darkness with

Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age

by W. Bernard Carlson  · 11 May 2013  · 733pp  · 184,118 words

that it could compete effectively with the transatlantic telegraph cables. Knowing that Morgan relied on messages sent between his New York and London offices by undersea cable, Tesla reported that he was now able to manipulate electrical pressures of a hundred million volts and hundreds of thousands of horsepower of electrical energy

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had faced with flying kites in the wintry weather. After mentioning that he hoped that wireless telegraphy would allow for cheaper messages than the existing undersea cables, Marconi concluded by raising a glass and toasting the institute. Marconi’s speech was followed by remarks from Thomson and Professor Michael Pupin of Columbia

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, 10, 57–59, 401, 404, 411; selling patents and, 107–13 (see also patents); Simpson and Crawford and, 256, 264; speculative bubbles and, 346–51; undersea cables and, 336; Vanderbilt and, 214, 230; Wall Street and, 2, 78–79, 130, 164, 206, 304, 311, 345, 349–50, 353, 357, 359; Wardenclyffe tower

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, 259–62, 265, 273–78, 284–86, 288, 295; trans-Atlantic, 152, 304–5, 312, 316, 332–37, 350, 442n22; tuning and, 262, 284–88; undersea cables and, 336; Wall Street and, 349; Wardenclyffe and, 329–35, 346, 362, 379, 382; witnessing tests of, 288–95; world telegraphy and, 337–46 wireless

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth  · 9 Feb 2021  · 651pp  · 186,130 words

: 13 Ground Rules for Job Success in the Information Age. I relied on Matthew Carle’s 2013 retrospective on Operation Ivy Bells to describe the undersea cable tap: “40 Years Ago, The Navy’s ‘Operation Ivy Bells’ Ended With a 70s Version of Edward Snowden,” published by Business Insider. A history of

@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex

by Shane Harris  · 14 Sep 2014  · 340pp  · 96,149 words

“kill switch” provision, stating that if ever directed by the US government, the company must be able to immediately sever all communications traveling through its undersea cables into the United States. This was a protective measure, meant to block the network from delivering malicious software or traffic in the event of a

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the new law gave the NSA more ways to enter it. As the NSA’s powers grew, it cast its net wider, tapping into the undersea cables that carry communications between continents. The agency started filtering the content of all e-mails going in and out of the United States, scanning them

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companies, [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>]. See also specific companies telecommunications networks: DOD, [>]; fiber-optic trunk lines, [>], [>], [>]; Google, [>]; kill switch provision, [>]; right to spy in exchange for US license, [>]; Skype, [>]; undersea cables, [>], [>] Telvent, [>]–[>], [>] terrorism. See counterterrorism; 9/11 attacks threat signature, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>] thumb drives, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>], [>] Tier [>], [>] tippers, within communications data, [>] Tiversa, [>]–[>] Tor, [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>] Tranche 2 plan, [>]–[>], [>] Transportation Security Administration, [>] transportation

Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It

by Richard A. Clarke and Robert Knake  · 15 Dec 2010  · 282pp  · 92,998 words

physical components, from the high-speed fiber-optic trunks, to every router, server, and “telecom hotel,” are all in sovereign nations, except perhaps for the undersea cables and the space-based relays. Even they are owned by countries or companies that have real-world physical addresses. Some people like to contend that

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

by Thomas L. Friedman  · 22 Nov 2016  · 602pp  · 177,874 words

that has been steadily quickening the transmission speeds of data and voice down fiber-optic cables. “The speed at which we can transmit data over undersea cables just keeps accelerating,” said Bucksbaum. The short version of the story, he explained, goes like this: We started out sending voice and data using a

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finding faster, better ways to divide the different properties of light to pack ever more information,” said Bucksbaum. “The rate of data transfer for an undersea cable today is now trillions of bits per second.” At some point, you end up “bumping up against the laws of physics,” he added, but we

The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics

by Ben Buchanan  · 25 Feb 2020  · 443pp  · 116,832 words

, major cloud service providers with gigantic amounts of data, and many other targets.8 The success of companies like Huawei in manufacturing, building, and repairing undersea cables and new 5G telecommunications infrastructure raises fears that the Chinese government may try to match the advantages in passive collection that the Five Eyes enjoy

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000

by John Steele Gordon  · 12 Oct 2009  · 519pp  · 148,131 words

not the only thing accelerating in the early nineteenth century. So was the speed of communications. It is hard to imagine today, when satellites and undersea cables keep every part of the globe in instant communication with every other part, just how slowly news spread in the eighteenth century. The battles of

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day. It had no real choice except to close as well. With the world’s markets now tied together with a cat’s cradle of undersea cables, sellers converged on New York, and sell orders began piling up in mountains awaiting the Saturday opening. (The New York Stock Exchange would have a

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synthetic voices, a technology that would have seemed utterly miraculous only a couple of decades ago. Communications satellites, together with an ever-increasing number of undersea cables, have helped greatly to lower the cost of long-distance telephony, leading to an astonishing upsurge in its use. In 1950 about a million overseas

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dashing back and forth between the stock exchange, banks, and brokerage houses, keeping all apprised of the latest prices, now a cat’s cradle of undersea cables and satellite links bound together the new global markets. This had profound political as well as economic consequences. As early as 1980, a unified market

Mapmatics: How We Navigate the World Through Numbers

by Paulina Rowinska  · 5 Jun 2024  · 361pp  · 100,834 words

.com/technology/laser. connecting users across continents: James Griffiths, ‘The Global Internet Is Powered by Vast Undersea Cables. But They’re Vulnerable’, CNN, 26 July 2019, https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/25/asia/internet-undersea-cables-intl-hnk/index.html. major internet disruptions on the US east coast: University of Southern California, ‘Internet

Building Secure and Reliable Systems: Best Practices for Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Systems

by Heather Adkins, Betsy Beyer, Paul Blankinship, Ana Oprea, Piotr Lewandowski and Adam Stubblefield  · 29 Mar 2020  · 1,380pp  · 190,710 words

large ship needs to hold its position at sea. The ship drops anchor and inadvertently hooks onto an undersea cable, which isn’t strong enough and breaks. While the risk of a vessel snagging an undersea cable is small, the effects can be catastrophic, having a huge impact on intercontinental network capacity—and this

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risk exists for all the undersea cables in the world, not just the one that happened to have been hooked by that one errant ship. A network outage of this type should

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

by Bruce Schneier  · 2 Mar 2015  · 598pp  · 134,339 words

communications was easy. A Chinese military network only carried Chinese communications. A Russian system was only used for Russian communications. If the NSA tapped an undersea cable between Petropavlovsk and Vladivostok, it didn’t have to worry about accidentally intercepting phone calls between Detroit and Cleveland. The Internet works differently. Everyone’s

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, Iranian, and Cuban government communications could also carry your Twitter feed. Internet phone calls between New York and Los Angeles might end up on Russian undersea cables. Communications between Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon might be routed through Florida. Google doesn’t store your data at its corporate headquarters in Mountain View

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Cold War. Before the Internet, when surveillance consisted largely of government-on-government espionage, agencies like the NSA would target specific communications circuits: that Soviet undersea cable between Petropavlovsk and Vladivostok, a military communications satellite, a microwave network. This was for the most part passive, requiring large antenna farms in nearby countries

The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa

by Calestous Juma  · 27 May 2017

of the infrastructure, the cost of bandwidth must decline. Already, Internet service providers are offering more bandwidth for the same cost. By 2011, the four undersea cables operating in Africa had resulted in a quadrupling of data transfer speeds and a 90% price reduction. Access to broadband is challenging Africa’s youth

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats

by Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake  · 15 Jul 2019  · 409pp  · 112,055 words

reality is that the United States has open borders in cyberspace. No agency of the federal government sits at the internet exchange points, where the undersea cables come up onto land, to inspect each packet of internet traffic. Without such a capability, the U.S. government is simply not positioned to block

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States. Most global internet traffic still travels through the United States. An email going from, say, Budapest to Hanoi would head across the Atlantic through undersea cables, traverse the Lower 48 states, and plunge into the Pacific before hitting Japan and being dispersed in the direction of Vietnam. The United States continues

War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis From the Middle East

by Gershom Gorenberg  · 19 Jan 2021  · 555pp  · 163,712 words

to London in early November with word from Wavell. A messenger was the only means of communication that Wavell trusted. Italy had cut Britain’s undersea cables in the Mediterranean, and Wavell feared the treachery of wireless. Anything sent by it, even in the best code you had, could give you away

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said American diplomatic telegrams to Washington were safe from interception—by the Axis. The unstated implication was that American traffic traveled on an intact British undersea cable. As for the wider question of US diplomatic codes and ciphers, this was delicate. The State Department had three code systems, the GCHQ note said

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up

by Philip N. Howard  · 27 Apr 2015  · 322pp  · 84,752 words

United Kingdom, and Europe. A significant amount of digital traffic flows through the cables at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. However, it’s not undersea cables that carry the most traffic, it’s overland cables. The fastest-growing region for internet traffic is within Asia—between China’s largest cities and

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy

by David Hoffman  · 1 Jan 2009  · 719pp  · 209,224 words

," and gave his debriefers some details. He said Mr. Long sold to the Soviets the details of the U.S. operation to tap the Soviet undersea cables in the Sea of Okhotsk. This was the monitoring operation known as Ivy Bells, which had been discovered and removed by the Soviets in 1981

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. (A second undersea cable-tapping operation in the Barents Sea had not been compromised.) The FBI launched a manhunt for Mr. Long, and four months later arrested Ronald Pelton

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy

by Benjamin Barber  · 20 Apr 2010  · 454pp  · 139,350 words

other main sites on the network are in Dunton, England; Cologne, Germany; Turin, Italy; Valencia, California; Hiroshima, Japan; and Melbourne, Australia. The circuits—satellite links, undersea cables and land lines—are purchased from telecommunications carriers.16 The virtual corporation also exists in the labor market as an employer of “virtual” rather than

Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst: A True Story of Inside Information and Corruption in the Stock Market

by Daniel Reingold and Jennifer Reingold  · 1 Jan 2006  · 506pp  · 146,607 words

it enough. It was this century’s equivalent of the railroad industry boom and bust in the late 1880s. Customers might use all of those undersea cables one day. But not anytime soon. Global’s collapse came in the shadow of Enron’s sudden meltdown the previous December, which had taken the

Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent

by Douglas Coupland  · 29 Sep 2014  · 124pp  · 36,360 words

higher than the one below it. It’s about as entrancing as watching insolent teenagers chew gum, but completely necessary. The Île de Bréhat’s undersea cable will be deployed on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean at a rate of up to seven kilometres per hour, and it will take seven

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1) Lower Indian Ocean Network (LION) North Asia Loop Pacific Fibre Pangea Baltic Ring Pangea North Saudi Arabia-Sudan-2 (SAS-2) SeaMeWe-4 Svalbard Undersea Cable System Tangerine Tasman-2 Tata TGN-Pacific Turcyos-2 Ulysses Yellow/Atlantic Crossing-2 (AC-2) Near land, most marine cables are laid inside deep

Reset

by Ronald J. Deibert  · 14 Aug 2020

multiple countries. Each of these elements is operated by numerous businesses, which can include internet service providers (ISPs), cable companies, cell service providers, satellite services, undersea cable providers, and telecommunications firms as well as the various hardware and software manufacturers supporting them all. Which companies operate the various components of this ecosystem

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” and have “direct access” to a lot of networking equipment and infrastructure. Their hubris was remarkable. By partnering with or otherwise enlisting the cooperation of undersea cable providers, telecommunications companies, and cell service operators, they hoovered up massive volumes of data flowing directly through the arteries of the global communications ecosystem, storing

Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell

by Phil Lapsley  · 5 Feb 2013  · 744pp  · 142,748 words

–73, 77 Wiretapping Ashley-Gravitt scandal 303–304, 306 Bookies 101 Engressia 127–128, 131 FBI 249–261, 272, 278 Legality 109–115, 288 Soviet undersea cables 182 Verification/blue box 249–261 White House 127–128, 229 See also: Greenstar; laws, 47 USC 605 Wink 54, 175, 371 Woolworth’s 29

America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy

by Robert B. Zoellick  · 3 Aug 2020

a ban on poison gases, Pacific security consultations, China’s independence and territorial integrity (including the Open Door principles), Chinese control of its customs charges, undersea cable rights across the Pacific, and a Sino-Japanese accord to restore the Shantung Peninsula to China. The four-power accord among the United States, Britain

There's a War Going on but No One Can See It

by Huib Modderkolk  · 1 Sep 2021  · 295pp  · 84,843 words

halfway around the world, in which case the packets speed across the oceans along thick, multi-layered, black cables on the seabed. Some of those undersea cables enter Europe through the Netherlands, at Beverwijk and Katwijk on the west coast and in the north at Eemshaven in the province of Groningen. The

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems

by Martin Kleppmann  · 17 Apr 2017

a switch could trigger a network topol‐ ogy reconfiguration, during which network packets could be delayed for more than a minute [17]. Sharks might bite undersea cables and damage them [18]. Other surpris‐ ing faults include a network interface that sometimes drops all inbound packets but sends outbound packets successfully [19]: just

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only inbound packets, 279 network partitions and whole-datacenter failures, 275 poor handling of network faults, 280 sending message to ex-partner, 494 sharks biting undersea cables, 279 split brain due to 1-minute packet delay, 158, 279 vibrations in server rack, 14 violation of uniqueness constraint, 529 indexes, 71, 555 and

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shared-nothing architecture, 17, 146-147, 557 (see also replication) distributed filesystems, 398 (see also distributed filesystems) partitioning, 199 use of network, 277 sharks biting undersea cables, 279 counting (example), 46-48 finding (example), 42 website about (example), 44 shredding (in relational model), 38 siblings (concurrent values), 190, 246 (see also conflicts

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

by Antonio Garcia Martinez  · 27 Jun 2016  · 559pp  · 155,372 words

phalanx of royal trumpeters, your impending arrival. So what happens to those globe-spanning bid requests, assuming they don’t drown in their trans-Atlantic undersea cable? The people listening for your presence in billions of such requests per day are known as “demand-side platforms” (DSPs), and they’re the stockbrokers

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

by Benjamin H. Bratton  · 19 Feb 2016  · 903pp  · 235,753 words

4000m down. It disrupted the Internet and telecommunications between Taiwan, China, Hong Kong and other parts of Southeast Asia”60 Flooded data centers and compromised undersea cables can knock out whole networks, which is especially concerning when you realize that “over 95% of global communications traffic is handled by just 1 million

Debt of Honor

by Tom Clancy  · 2 Jan 1994

known submarine contacts were off the screen. Two hydrophone arrays that were operated from the island of Guam were no longer available. Though connected by undersea cable to the rest of the network, they'd evidently been turned off by the monitoring facility on Guam, and nobody at Pearl had yet been

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a storm that took a lot of lines down. Except for a couple of things. One, there wasn't any storm. Two, there's an undersea cable and a satellite link. Three, a week is a long time. What's going on?" the reporter asked. "How many people are asking?" "Right now

Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology

by Anu Bradford  · 25 Sep 2023  · 898pp  · 236,779 words

,” as used in this chapter, broadly describes Chinese companies’ growing global role in building not only physical digital infrastructures (such as 5G telecom networks and undersea cables) but also other types of foundational digital ecosystems (such as cloud systems and AI-driven surveillance capabilities) that countries, cities, and other governing entities procure

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also have a strong presence in constructing digital infrastructure such as fiber optic cables across the region.51 In addition, Huawei Marine has undertaken several undersea cable projects in the Philippines and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, further illustrating the pervasive influence that Chinese tech companies have exercised in the region. The Chinese

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems

by Martin Kleppmann  · 16 Mar 2017  · 1,237pp  · 227,370 words

for a switch could trigger a network topology reconfiguration, during which network packets could be delayed for more than a minute [17]. Sharks might bite undersea cables and damage them [18]. Other surprising faults include a network interface that sometimes drops all inbound packets but sends outbound packets successfully [19]: just because

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, Faults and Partial Failures poor handling of network faults, Network Faults in Practice sending message to ex-partner, Ordering events to capture causality sharks biting undersea cables, Network Faults in Practice split brain due to 1-minute packet delay, Leader failure: Failover, Network Faults in Practice vibrations in server rack, Describing Performance

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Data-Distributed Data, Glossary(see also replication) distributed filesystems, MapReduce and Distributed Filesystems(see also distributed filesystems) partitioning, Partitioning use of network, Unreliable Networks sharksbiting undersea cables, Network Faults in Practice counting (example), MapReduce Querying-MapReduce Querying finding (example), Query Languages for Data website about (example), Declarative Queries on the Web shredding

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race

by Tim Fernholz  · 20 Mar 2018  · 328pp  · 96,141 words

and time-consuming. It was no way to bring the information age to sparsely populated areas or those, like Rwanda, that are far from the undersea cables that link the continents together. Why not just use satellites to do the job of linking the local network to the outside world? In 2007

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet

by Varun Sivaram  · 2 Mar 2018  · 469pp  · 132,438 words

North Africa with windy Europe. Then, the grand third stage will bring together the regional supergrids to form a single global supergrid, linked by transoceanic undersea cables and electrical superstations where lines would converge (figure 8.1). Figure 8.1 A global supergrid. This map combines various proposed regional supergrids (for example

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beyond regional supergrids to achieve a global one is pretty implausible, requiring more international trust, far more money, and further advances in such technologies as undersea cables. Nevertheless, that ultimate vision might function as an inspirational, if perhaps impossible, target toward which even partial progress—such as the establishment of regional supergrids

Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe

by Ray Jayawardhana  · 10 Dec 2013  · 203pp  · 63,257 words

the Earth to the other straight through the planet, whereas a radio signal needs to be bounced off multiple satellites in orbit or transmitted through undersea cables circling the globe. Along similar lines, one scientist has suggested using neutrino beams to send messages to submarines deep underwater. To have any chance of

Ten Technologies to Save the Planet: Energy Options for a Low-Carbon Future

by Chris Goodall  · 1 Jan 2010  · 297pp  · 95,518 words

be far from high-voltage transmission lines and to use the full force of the Pentland Firth, the U.K. will need a new offshore undersea cable running down the east coast to London and on to the rest of Europe, using the same HVDC technology that will bring Saharan solar power

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World

by Scott Galloway  · 2 Oct 2017  · 305pp  · 79,303 words

-google-blimps-to-bring-wireless-internet-to-africa/#4439e478449b. 48. Weise, Elizabeth. “Microsoft, Facebook to lay massive undersea cable.” USA Today. May 26, 2016. https://www.usatoday.com/story/experience/2016/05/26/microsoft-facebook-undersea-cable-google-marea-amazon/84984882/. 49. “The Nokia effect.” Economist. August 25, 2012. http://www.economist.com/node

The Grand Scuttle

by Dan Van der Vat  · 266pp  · 87,456 words

a two-day break for cleaning, running repairs and coaling. Müller then headed west to the British Cocos Islands to destroy the vital junction of undersea cables linking Australia, India and Africa at Direction Island. He anchored offshore on 9 November and put ashore a landing party, which demolished the relay station

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey

by Emmanuel Goldstein  · 28 Jul 2008  · 889pp  · 433,897 words

of the three remaining systems for overseas working. There are few technical limitations to prevent R2 from working with satellites, TASI, or other analog/digital underseas cables. The spec is flexible enough to allow overseas working, but is not done at the present time. R2 is likely to displace C5 on the

Wall Street Meat

by Andy Kessler  · 17 Mar 2003  · 270pp  · 75,803 words

glory of moving stocks and of raising billions. Jack became a kingmaker. Gary Winnick had started Global Crossing to sell undersea cable and take market share from AT&T and others. His first undersea cable, Atlantic Crossing 1, cost a few hundred million and was soon generating $100 million a month. Jack was just

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System

by James Rickards  · 7 Apr 2014  · 466pp  · 127,728 words

is tantamount to a BRICS Internet intended to be free from U.S. surveillance. The United States has long had excellent capability in tapping into undersea cables, so the actual security of the new system may be problematic. Nevertheless, the proprietary nature of this system could easily be adapted to include a

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance

by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna  · 23 May 2016  · 437pp  · 113,173 words

dangerous ways. The same strait and canal chokepoints through which the world’s ships must pass are also the best routes along which to lay undersea cables. Every year in Africa, the networks of whole countries go dark when one of these threads is cut by a passing ship’s anchor—or

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers

by Andy Greenberg  · 12 Sep 2012  · 461pp  · 125,845 words

had a mutual regard for the other’s alpha geek status that went beyond reading each other’s research, and they exchanged ideas over the undersea cables that connected Melbourne and Boston. More than once, they met in the physical world, including at least one meal together at the Chaos Communication Congress

The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance

by Ron Chernow  · 1 Jan 1990  · 1,335pp  · 336,772 words

; first and foremost, 23 Wall operated as an arm of Washington. Consider telecommunications. After the war, the United States feared the British military monopoly of undersea cable communications, which had yielded invaluable wartime intelligence. The U.S. Navy favored the use of a new private corporation, supported by Washington, to battle Britain

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon

by Kim Zetter  · 11 Nov 2014  · 492pp  · 153,565 words

elsewhere to collect intelligence it can’t otherwise obtain through bulk-data collection programs from internet companies like Google and Yahoo or from taps of undersea cables and internet nodes. Terrorism suspects aren’t the NSA’s only targets, however. Operations against nation-state adversaries have exploded in recent years as well

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

by Anthony M. Townsend  · 29 Sep 2013  · 464pp  · 127,283 words

routers that power the Internet. Cisco’s products not only push bits around offices, schools, and homes, but also sling them back and forth across undersea cables that link continents. It’s one of Silicon Valley’s largest and most-watched bellwethers. For a brief period in March 2000, at the height

Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton  · 26 Sep 2012  · 1,266pp  · 344,635 words

e-i to establish a secure link to Vermekia. A secure connection through a six-thousand-kilometer e-Ray relay above the jungle, then an undersea cable, followed by another four-thousand-kilometer landline with dozens of civilian relays and cells was something of a joke, but the call was audio only

Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State

by Barton Gellman  · 20 May 2020  · 562pp  · 153,825 words

is a complex infrastructure with major components including trunk lines of fiber optic cable, high-capacity switches known as core routers, cable landing stations where undersea cables join terrestrial networks, and Internet Exchange Points. The majority of worldwide telephone and internet traffic passes to, from, or through U.S. infrastructure. $394 million

The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy From Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography

by Simon Singh  · 1 Jan 1999

of the First World War, the British ship Telconia approached the German coast under cover of darkness, dropped anchor, and hauled up a clutch of undersea cables. These were Germany’s transatlantic cables—its communication links to the rest of the world. By the time the sun had risen, they had been

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

by Steven Levy  · 12 Apr 2011  · 666pp  · 181,495 words

traffic to Baidu. An apparent whispering campaign attributed the problem to Google’s alleged ineptness in serving China. The most charitable fiction was that an undersea cable had broken, cutting off service from the United States. Google had hoped that its decision to create a search engine in the .cn domain—one

The Girl in the Road

by Monica Byrne  · 19 May 2014  · 325pp  · 92,622 words

but weighs about twelve milligrams per thousand meters. And thanks to HydraCorp’s partnership with China Telecom, the anchors parallel the SEA-ME-WE 3 undersea cable that carries data between Mumbai and Djibouti before veering up the Red Sea. And how does the TALG survive the many intrusions of maritime traffic

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition

by Jonathan Tepper  · 20 Nov 2018  · 417pp  · 97,577 words

/wiki/Google_data_centers. 67. https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure. 68. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5275893/Google-reveals-plan-build-THREE-new-undersea-cables.html. 69. http://www.wired.co.uk/article/google-facebook-plcn-internet-cable/. 70. https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/10/12/scale-wetxp

Daring Raids of World War Two: Heroic Land, Sea and Air Attacks

by Peter Jacobs  · 29 Jun 2015  · 296pp  · 95,377 words

identified, but the following month Fell was given the opportunity to use his midgets to cut some telegraph cables off Hong Kong. By cutting the undersea cables connecting Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong and Tokyo, the Japanese would be forced to use radio communications and, therefore, open themselves to message interception. Missions to

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon

by Neil Sheehan  · 21 Sep 2009  · 589pp  · 197,971 words

appropriate gear, put to sea whenever there was to be a launch, filling in the gaps, particularly between Antigua and Ascension in the South Atlantic. Undersea cables tied many of the stations back to Cape Canaveral, providing instantaneous and secure communications. The radar at the stations, while sophisticated and precise, fulfilled the

The Turing Option

by Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky  · 2 Jan 1992  · 532pp  · 140,406 words

United States." "Is it a satellite link?" "No, satellite connections are too slow for most uses— particularly telepresence. Everything is fiber optics now— even the undersea cables. Cheap and fast. With plenty of room for communication with eight thousand megahertz band-width capacity available everywhere—and all of it two-way." Brian

Moonshot: The Inside Story of Mankind's Greatest Adventure

by Dan Parry  · 22 Jun 2009  · 370pp  · 100,856 words

telemetry were passed to Houston via NASA's Communications Network, which linked the ground stations and other facilities through two million miles of landlines and undersea cables. Relying on six intermediate switching centres around the world, and two communications satellites, the network included redundant signal routes to increase reliability. Some remote switching

The Crux

by Richard Rumelt  · 27 Apr 2022  · 363pp  · 109,834 words

we have seventy-five people working on three different efforts. One is drone-based sensors. A second is working on sensors to be integrated into undersea cables, and the third is looking at integrating our sensors into Wi-Fi and Internet environments. Right now, they are wired rather than wireless. The owners

Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design

by Alvin E. Roth  · 1 Jun 2015  · 282pp  · 80,907 words

a result, cotton shipments began to more closely match the fluctuations in the market, and prices on the cotton market became less volatile. Before the undersea cable, it was harder to match supply with demand because the news that arrived in New York was already more than a week old—slower than

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World

by Niall Ferguson  · 1 Jan 2002  · 469pp  · 146,487 words

play a decisive part in suppressing the Mutiny.* However, the crucial development from the point of view of imperial rule was the construction of durable undersea cables. Significantly, it was an imperial product – a rubber-like substance from Malaya called gutta-percha – that solved the problem, allowing the first cross-Channel cable

The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future

by Geoffrey Cain  · 28 Jun 2021  · 340pp  · 90,674 words

revealed that the NSA was tracking twenty Chinese hacker teams attempting to break into US government networks and companies like Google. Huawei was also laying undersea cables that the NSA hoped to intercept, so it could read the communications of Huawei customers that happened to be “high-priority targets,” like Cuba, Iran

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000

by Paul Kennedy  · 15 Jan 1989  · 1,477pp  · 311,310 words

in 1721 6. European Colonial Empires, c. 1750 7. Europe at the Height of Napoleon’s Power, 1810 8. The Chief Possessions, Naval Bases, and Submarine Cables of the British Empire, c. 1900 9. The European Powers and Their War Plans in 1914 10. Europe After the First World War 11. Europe

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane

by Brett King  · 5 May 2016  · 385pp  · 111,113 words

US$850 million dollars (US$41 million actual) in 1876. Western Union was operating more than a million miles of telegraph lines and two international undersea cables at the time. When Alexander Graham Bell and his partners5 patented the telephone in 1876, initially referring to it as a “talking telegraph”, they offered

The Deepest Map

by Laura Trethewey  · 15 May 2023

mostly follow shipping lanes used by international cargo fleets, which carry more than 95 percent of world trade, or they indicate the surveyed seafloor where submarine cables, which carry over 90 percent of the world’s internet traffic, lie.2 In certain places, such as the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana and

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Sandwell as pioneer of, 18 satellite predictions and, 3, 17, 18–19, 100, 140–41 seafloor terrain knowledge base and, 16 sediment sampling and, 1 submarine cables and, 9, 69–70 technology and tools for, 5–6, 15–16 territorial waters and, 9, 104 Marie Tharp’s expertise in, 69–71, 76

Wireless

by Charles Stross  · 7 Jul 2009

ocean at two-thousand-kilometer intervals, but the equipment is a pig to maintain, very expensive to build, and nobody is even joking about stringing undersea cables across a million kilometers of seafloor. Misha’s problem is that the expedition, himself included, is effectively stranded back in the eighteenth century, without even

Zeitgeist

by Bruce Sterling  · 1 Nov 2000  · 333pp  · 86,662 words

the antiprogressive Dark Forces!” “Uh, yeah. That would be the alleged phenomenon.” “ECHELON is run by the UK, USA, Australia, and New Zealand. It uses undersea-cable taps, and surveillance satellites like ‘Aquacade,’ ‘Rhyolite,’ and ‘Magnum.’ It taps the Internet through its major routing centers and does comprehensive word searches on e

Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World

by Margaret Macmillan; Richard Holbrooke; Casey Hampton  · 1 Jan 2001

make reparation; on Germany’s borders, its colonies and its armed forces; on the punishment of German war criminals; even on the fate of German submarine cables. The big question, though—how to punish Germany and how to keep it under control in the future—had barely been touched on by Clemenceau

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence

by James Bridle  · 6 Apr 2022  · 502pp  · 132,062 words

the internet: the vast, planet-spanning network of cables, wires, machines and electromagnetic signals which sustains and regulates humanity today. These microprocessors and data centres, undersea cables and wireless transmissions are our own mycorrhizal network, interpenetrating everyday life, managing our supplies and demands, disturbing the climate and touching upon our own skin

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization

by Parag Khanna  · 18 Apr 2016  · 497pp  · 144,283 words

from São Paulo to Peru’s Pacific port of San Juan de Marcona, bridges connecting Arabia to Africa, a tunnel from Siberia to Alaska, polar submarine cables on the Arctic seabed from London to Tokyo, and electricity grids transferring Saharan solar power under the Mediterranean to Europe. Britain’s exclave of Gibraltar

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efforts to create redundant communications in the event of enemy attack. Today it is becoming a network that can withstand any rupture, whether physically uprooted submarine cables or digitally disrupted services. The Internet now exists independently of the governments that created it; they function within cyberspace, not the reverse. The militarization of

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from a terrorist attack or regional conflict would have minimal system-wide impact. The same is true for Internet cables: There are at least twenty submarine cable breaks per year due to targeted attacks or accidental ship anchor ruptures, but constantly laying more of them ensures redundancy for our exponentially growing data

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth

by Fred Pearce  · 28 May 2012  · 379pp  · 114,807 words

plans to construct a giant 1,800-megawatt hydroelectric plant that would flood much of the valley of the Purari River and send power by undersea cable 300 miles across the Coral Sea to Queensland. Some locals in the flood zone said they knew about the project, but others claimed they had

Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World

by Oliver Morton  · 15 Feb 2003  · 409pp  · 129,423 words

splashing into its rooftop dishes. Upstream and on the near side sit the long, low workshops where for more than a century men have made undersea cables to tie the continents together. New skyscrapers devoted to global businesses sit in the redeveloped heart of the docks that used to handle the lion

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World

by Gaia Vince  · 22 Aug 2022  · 302pp  · 92,206 words

the world’s largest solar battery installation in its northern desert, which will send 24-hour renewable electricity to Singapore via a 4,500-kilometre undersea cable system, to be completed by 2027. Australia already produces far more solar power than it can use or store. North Africa is also sending high

The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters

by Diane Coyle  · 15 Apr 2025  · 321pp  · 112,477 words

and soft, and this is as good a place as any to discuss it. The physical component consists of communications networks—­fixed line, wireless, and undersea cables—­and data centres. The physical infrastructure is fascinating and underresearched and indeed undermea­sured (like all infrastructure—­see Chapter 8). One excellent resource is TeleGeography

The Twittering Machine

by Richard Seymour  · 20 Aug 2019  · 297pp  · 83,651 words

and smudges the self across ‘a global mesh of nodes and links’.60 This hard infrastructure, from sensors in the smartphone to cellular base stations, undersea cables, microwave relays and networks of users, organizes from end to end a person’s experience of the world, her selfhood. In addition to breaking up

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency

by Annie Jacobsen  · 14 Sep 2015  · 558pp  · 164,627 words

the bunker were members of the bomb’s firing party, a team of six engineers, three Army technicians, and one nuclear scientist. Miles of waterproof submarine cable connected the racks of electronic equipment inside the bunker to the Castle Bravo bomb, which was located on a separate island, nineteen miles across Bikini

Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire

by Simon Winchester  · 31 Dec 1985  · 382pp  · 127,510 words

were tested some hapless matelot turned on too much power and miles of wiring burned out in a flash and a drizzle of sparks. A submarine cable laid to Montevideo snapped, twice. Then a set of rhombus aerials was built for a space-research team that came to the Falklands in the

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution

by Charles R. Morris  · 1 Jan 2012  · 456pp  · 123,534 words

portion of the bay. The details of his positioning gave him two crucial advantages. The first is that he set kedges, or auxiliary anchors, with undersea cabling so crews could winch their ships around to change broadsides without losing anchorage. The second is that the narrowness of his anchorage site helped to

Civilization: The West and the Rest

by Niall Ferguson  · 28 Feb 2011  · 790pp  · 150,875 words

East to the West Coast of the United States by a third.48 By the late 1860s, thanks to the introduction of gutta-percha coating, undersea cables could be laid and telegrams sent from London to Bombay or to Halifax.49 News of the Indian Mutiny had taken forty-six days to

Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping

by Roger Faligot  · 30 Jun 2019  · 615pp  · 187,426 words

200 stations that used Asian civilian satellites. The international branch had 100 stations serving South-East Asia via satellite, North America, Japan and Oceania by submarine cable, and Europe, Africa and Asia from satellites in the Indian Ocean.10 It is possible to trace the birth of Chinese economic surveillance back to

The Pentagon: A History

by Steve Vogel  · 26 May 2008  · 760pp  · 218,087 words

to providing a system from scratch for a city the size of Trenton, New Jersey—an ambitious plan had been devised to lay a dozen submarine cables one-third of a mile across the bottom of the Potomac River. These would connect the switchboard with the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company’s

After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405

by John Darwin  · 5 Feb 2008  · 650pp  · 203,191 words

’ railways, like those built in India after 1860, economized on the size of the garrisons needed to safeguard foreign control. The electric telegraph and the submarine cable played a similar role, enabling instructions to be sent, warnings to be issued, help to be summoned in a matter of hours not weeks. Information

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extension eastward of the steamship lines and their scheduled services, creating the great trunk road of merchant shipping all the way to Shanghai and Yokohama. Submarine cables and the overland telegraph could nowbring commercial and political news from East Asia to Europe within days, and then hours. But most of all it

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of the world was drawn into the nexus of communications that already existed between Europe and America. Steamships, railways and the electric telegraph, with its submarine cables, nowgirdled the earth. After 1900, the extension of this network to include every productive region seemed only a matter of time. The exchange of products

Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town

by Lamorna Ash  · 1 Apr 2020  · 319pp  · 108,797 words

its body suddenly contorts upwards, suggesting the seabed rises dramatically, there is likely to be something large below us, such as an old anchor or submarine cables that we are in danger of pulling up in our nets, or, worse, the object could yank down one of the huge derricks and capsize

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. Skilled men and women from cities around the UK were sent down there to work at the telegraph station, where many of the world’s submarine cables came ashore. The Cornish were somewhat suspicious of these telegraph stations that cropped up around the coast, attracting hordes of foreigners. In 1904, Cornish Evening

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

by David Fromkin  · 2 Jan 1989  · 681pp  · 214,967 words

's suggestion of sinister manipulations in the Tunisia affair were not far off the mark: there were speculations in real estate, railway con-cessions, and submarine cable telegraph concessions, whatever their relation might have been to the formulation of government policy. The financial corruption surrounding the adventure in Indochina was even more

Lonely Planet Iceland (Travel Guide)

by Lonely Planet, Carolyn Bain and Alexis Averbuck  · 31 Mar 2015

, Iceland is shoring up its position as a green-energy superpower, looking to export its know-how (and quite possibly its actual energy, transmitted via undersea cables) to foreign shores. It's wooing more big-business energy users, to try to convince them to set up shop (large aluminium smelters are already

Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World

by Mark Pendergrast  · 2 Jan 2000  · 564pp  · 153,720 words

coffee men, the Paulistas of São Paulo, pushed for more technological change and innovation—primarily to advance the sale of coffee. In 1874 the new submarine cable facilitated communication with Europe. By the following year 29 percent of the boats entering Brazilian harbors were powered by steam rather than sail. In 1874

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World By century’s end, technology had made worldwide communication virtually instantaneous. Coffee exchanges in major European ports corresponded rapidly with New York. “Silently the submarine cable ticks off the news that supple fingers chalk and print of steamers leaving Rio and Santos on certain days, and with what cargoes,” wrote Richard

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News

by Eric Berkowitz  · 3 May 2021  · 412pp  · 115,048 words

war will be in London,” and that it should be “fought in a fog.”40 As soon as the fighting began, in August, all the undersea cables surrounding Britain except those that were British-owned were cut, and all communications entering the country were intercepted. Britain’s secretary of state for war

The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans

by Mark Lynas  · 3 Oct 2011  · 369pp  · 98,776 words

take their clean electricity to markets. In October 2010 Google Foundation became a partner in the Atlantic Wind Connection, a plan for a high-voltage undersea cable to bring large-scale offshore wind to the U.S. East Coast.72 In the U.K. onshore wind is increasingly being stymied by local

The Longing for Less: Living With Minimalism

by Kyle Chayka  · 21 Jan 2020  · 237pp  · 69,985 words

possible and removes ports—see headphone jacks—any chance it gets. The iPhone’s function depends on an enormous, complex, ugly superstructure of satellites and undersea cables that certainly aren’t designed in pristine whiteness. Minimalist design encourages us to forget everything a product relies on and imagine, in this example, that

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution

by Henry Schlesinger  · 16 Mar 2010  · 336pp  · 92,056 words

himself. With Whitehouse out of the picture, the project was revitalized when Thomson’s theories were proven in other parts of the world with other submarine cables. New money was raised and a second attempt was in the planning stages even as the Civil War raged. The deathblow finally fell on what

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across the landscape. Within thirty years of Morse’s demonstration in 1844, there were some 650,000 miles of cable and 30,000 miles of submarine cable linking more than 20,000 towns and villages. By 1880 there were an estimated 100,000 miles of undersea wiring connecting continents. The world was

The Scientist as Rebel

by Freeman Dyson  · 1 Jan 2006  · 332pp  · 109,213 words

of maps therefore depended on the accuracy of long-distance transmission of time signals. The transmission of time signals, first by overland telegraph lines and undersea cables, and later by radio, was a difficult technical problem. Signals were attenuated by transmission losses and corrupted by ambient noise. The transmission introduced delays which

Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain

by John Darwin  · 12 Feb 2013

the information that they were willing to share, and established ‘exchanges’ where produce prices were listed. From the 1850s the spreading network of telegraphs and submarine cables allowed vital price information to be gathered with revolutionary speed: a transatlantic cable was laid in 1866; by the 1870s India, Southeast Asia and even

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sold on the goods that arrived. But many commercial transactions in London concerned goods that never reached it or any other British port. 10. British submarine cable system, 1929 This was because an enormous share of world trade used what was known as the ‘bill on London’ to reduce the inconvenience, cost

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advance 7. The British invasion of Egypt, 1882 8. Atlantic commerce in the eighteenth century 9. Principal British trade routes and commodities, 1923 10. British submarine cable system, 1929 11. British foreign investment to 1914 12. India, 1858–1947 13. India in 1857 14. The Royal Navy and its stations, 1875 and

The Ultimate Engineer: The Remarkable Life of NASA's Visionary Leader George M. Low

by Richard Jurek  · 2 Dec 2019  · 431pp  · 118,074 words

have predicted color television broadcasts from China would have been possible.” He discussed the use of satellites for voice communication, over the antiquated use of undersea cable systems. He discussed solar-energy applications, pointing out that NASA was now exploring “ways of collecting the sun’s energy” for practical use on Earth

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order

by Rush Doshi  · 24 Jun 2021  · 816pp  · 191,889 words

with allies and partners, the United States should fund alternatives to those projects that have the greatest strategic potential (e.g., dual-use port projects, undersea cables, airfields) or work to multilateralize Chinese funding to ensure the United States has a seat at the table. •Counter Chinese Technology Acquisition and Theft: China

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media

by Peter Warren Singer and Emerson T. Brooking  · 15 Mar 2018

Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (PublicAffairs, 2014), 2. 181 crew of the CS Alert: “British Cable Steamer Cuts Germany’s Trans-Atlantic Submarine Cables,” Palestine: Information with Provenance Database, accessed March 20, 2018, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/event.php?eid=4289. 181 all seven of

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers

by Andy Greenberg  · 5 Nov 2019  · 363pp  · 105,039 words

secret data-gathering tools, labeled broadly as “signals intelligence,” or “sigint,” that ranged from the ability to siphon vast quantities of raw internet data from undersea cables to hacking enemy systems administrators and looking over their shoulders at private networks. “When you’re given access to essentially the entirety of the U

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

by Daniel Immerwahr  · 19 Feb 2019

, through Malaya, possessed the world’s sole supply of the natural latex gutta-percha—the only material until plastic that could effectively insulate deep-sea submarine cables. Yet mere preponderance wasn’t enough. The British obsessed over acquiring an “all red” network, red being the color of the British Empire on the

A Crack in the Edge of the World

by Simon Winchester  · 9 Oct 2006  · 482pp  · 147,281 words

Atlantic Ocean had long before been crossed by telegraph wires; in 1903 it was to be the turn of the Pacific, which acquired its first submarine cable in the same year that Orville and Wilbur Wright launched their tiny biplane beside the sea at Kitty Hawk. A message sent from the White

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accounts. More recently there are records from sudden single events that puzzle and perplex to this day: the Grand Banks Earthquake of 1929 (which broke submarine cables and spawned waves that killed dozens in the outports of Newfoundland); and three still notorious New York state events, Massena in 1944, Goodnow in 1983

Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities

by Vaclav Smil  · 23 Sep 2019

40%/year and capacity of submarine fiber-optic cables was growing by 33%/year: the record holder in 2018 was the 13,000-km long submarine cable between Los Angeles and Hong Kong whose six fiber-optic pairs will be able to transmit 144 terabits in both directions (Hecht 2018). Per capita

Turing's Cathedral

by George Dyson  · 6 Mar 2012

environment by repeating themselves, once a generation, through a digital, error-correcting phase, the same way repeater stations are used to convey intelligible messages over submarine cables where noise is being introduced. The transition from digital once a generation to digital all the time began in 1953. The race was on to

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future

by Kai-Fu Lee and Qiufan Chen  · 13 Sep 2021

the Special Advisory Group, he gave Robin the green light. 176 seconds. Robin’s plan was for humans to cut off the power grid and submarine cable connections themselves. They would have to shut down root servers, signal transfer facilities, and all electronic equipment to minimize the impact of high-altitude EMPs

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

by Niall Ferguson  · 13 Nov 2007  · 471pp  · 124,585 words

century, the key technologies of the industrial revolution could be transferred anywhere. Communication lags had been dramatically reduced thanks to the laying of an international undersea cable network. Capital was abundantly available and, as we shall see, British investors were more than ready to risk their money in remote countries. Equipment was

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon!

by Joseph N. Pelton  · 5 Nov 2016  · 321pp  · 89,109 words

the oceans. As of the 1950s and 1960s there were coaxial submarine telephone cables that were able to provide international telephone connections. But the largest submarine cable had a capacity of 36 voice circuits. The technology then known as Time Assignment Speech Interpolation (TASI ) was able to double this capacity by assigning

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World

by Timothy Garton Ash  · 23 May 2016  · 743pp  · 201,651 words

Leibniz in the seventeenth century—are transmitted through physical, usually fibre-optic cables, laid under the oceans and snaking across continents. (Some of the main submarine cables can be seen in Map 8.) Map 8. The physical internet This map shows major submarine internet cable systems. Source: TeleGeography, 2015. In 2011, a

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platforms, 51–52; opposing hate speech on, 220–21, 237–41 (240f); role of money, 367–69; smartphone and mobile internet, 11; as ‘splinternet,’ 54; submarine cable system, 349–50 (350f); surveillance as business model, 284 Internet Engineering Task Force, 21, 353 intrusion and exposure, 288 Iran, 32–33, 46, 48, 99

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life

by Adam Greenfield  · 29 May 2017  · 410pp  · 119,823 words

rests vitally on the smooth interfunctioning of all the many parts of this infrastructure—an extraordinarily heterogeneous and unstable meshwork, in which cellular base stations, undersea cables, and microwave relays are all invoked in what seems like the simplest and most straightforward tasks we perform with the device. The very first lesson

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy

by Nathan Schneider  · 10 Sep 2018  · 326pp  · 91,559 words

new telegraph lines separately, there wouldn’t be enough lines. So the competitors had no choice but to cooperate—to import news from Europe via undersea cables, to co-sponsor horse-borne dispatches from the Mexican front, to circulate one another’s reporting. The New York papers shared ownership and control of

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914

by Richard J. Evans  · 31 Aug 2016  · 976pp  · 329,519 words

. The need to standardize time had already become urgent with the spread of telegraphing systems across not only Europe but also the world. The first submarine cables were laid across the English Channel in the early 1850s, and already in 1852, Edward Highton (1817–59), a pioneer of the electromagnetic telegraph, commented

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence

by Richard Yonck  · 7 Mar 2017  · 360pp  · 100,991 words

as it takes a very sophisticated technology to call a person instantaneously on the other side of the planet using an elaborate network of satellites, undersea cables, cell towers, and supercomputers, sometimes known as a smartphone. Most of us don’t give this latter process a moment’s thought because it has

Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

by Michael Lewis  · 2 Oct 2023  · 263pp  · 92,618 words

learn that the Securities Commission of The Bahamas was putting the finishing touches on new crypto regulations.§ The Bahamas had great internet, piped in by undersea cable from Florida. It had a neutral tax system that gave you credit for taxes paid to other countries, empty office space, and a truly wild

To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora, 1750-2010

by T M Devine  · 25 Aug 2011

expansion in steam services and the opening of the Suez Canal.40 By 1851 telegraph wires traversed the USA and five years later a transatlantic submarine cable successfully linked Britain and America. A striking feature of the investment saga was how agents and managers from Scottish companies were able to travel abroad

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know

by P. W. Singer and Allan Friedman  · 3 Jan 2014  · 587pp  · 117,894 words

the network, every router, every switch is within the sovereign borders of a nation-state and therefore subject to its laws or travels on a submarine cable or satellite connection owned by a company that is incorporated in a sovereign nation-state and therefore subject to its laws. In other words, there

Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium

by Carl Sagan  · 11 May 1998  · 272pp  · 76,089 words

enough to be available, at least occasionally, to the average person. Such a technology began with the invention of the telegraph and the laying of submarine cables; was greatly expanded by the invention of the telephone, using the same cables; and then enormously proliferated with the invention of radio, television, and satellite

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language

by Robert McCrum  · 24 May 2010  · 325pp  · 99,983 words

the exploitation of new technology might save Britain from inexorable decline. More than steamships and railways, wrote Seeley, it would be the electric telegraph and submarine cable that would interweave the fabric of empire. Seeley was a man of his time: the mid-nineteenth century was supremely an age of new technology

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime

by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden  · 24 Oct 2022  · 392pp  · 114,189 words

Sea Coast,” WijkAanZee.net, wijkaanzee.net/en/wijk-aan-zee.php#:~:text=Wijk%20aan%20Zee%20is%20also,at%20the%20North%20Sea%20coast. fiber-optic cables: “Submarine Cable Map: Beverwijk, Netherlands, Atlantic Crossing-1 (AC-1),” TeleGeography, submarinecablemap.com/landing-point/beverwijk-netherlands. top marks: Author interview with Marijn Schuurbiers, team leader, Dutch

The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia

by Peter Hopkirk  · 2 Jan 1991  · 580pp  · 194,144 words

Britain the largest shareholder in the Suez Canal Company. A second major improvement in communications with India was the opening, in 1870, of a direct submarine cable link with London. Five years earlier an overland telegraph line had been completed, but traffic went via Teheran and was thus vulnerable to interference or

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severance in time of war. The new submarine cable was far less vulnerable. ‘As long as England holds the empire of the sea the cables will be safe from enemies,’ declared The Times. ‘To

Hidden Figures

by Margot Lee Shetterly  · 11 Aug 2016  · 425pp  · 116,409 words

rate. The tracking stations captured the signals with their sixty-four-foot receiving dishes, then relayed this data plus voice communications through a jumble of submarine cables, landlines, and radio waves to the computer center at Goddard. The IBM machines used the inputs they received to make calculations based on the orbit

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

by James Gleick  · 1 Mar 2011  · 855pp  · 178,507 words

narrow enough to stretch a wire across. Within a few years, though, an insulated cable was laid under the harbor. Across the English Channel, a submarine cable twenty-five miles long made the connection between Dover and Calais in 1851. Soon after, a knowledgeable authority warned: “All idea of connecting Europe with

Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets

by Donald MacKenzie  · 24 May 2021  · 400pp  · 121,988 words

New Jersey datacenters in which shares, sovereign bonds, and currencies are bought and sold, but signals radiating from the towers also cross the oceans, by submarine cable or shortwave radio, to datacenters in Greater London, Frankfurt, Mumbai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and beyond—to everywhere that automated trading takes place. The microwave

1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in Its Downfall

by Peter Millar  · 1 Oct 2009  · 220pp  · 88,994 words

Jew, using carrier pigeons to link fledgling French and German telegraph lines had moved to London in 1851 after the laying of the Dover-Calais submarine cable, and subsequently spread a network of correspondents across the world. Reuters got a famous scoop in 1865 when a correspondent arriving on a ship from

The scramble for Africa, 1876-1912

by Thomas Pakenham  · 19 Nov 1991  · 1,194pp  · 371,889 words

of posts marching beside the cart track across the rolling veld to the blue hills of Natal, and so (by way of Durban and the submarine cable route via Aden) connecting Britain’s newest Crown Colony with London. This telegraph line had been a rushed job, and so had cost a fortune

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made

by Gaia Vince  · 19 Oct 2014  · 505pp  · 147,916 words

is only one option – with the increasing advances made in high-temperature superconductors, efficient transmission of electricity can also be made over larger distances using submarine cables. Geothermal energy produced in Iceland, and hydroelectricity produced in Norway, can be transmitted in this way to Britain, for example. Another option is to store

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age

by Alex Wright  · 6 Jun 2014

(1912). Reproduced with permission from the Mundaneum. 117 C ATA L O G I N G T H E WO R L D interoceanic canals, submarine cables, and wireless telegraphy. Taken together, it would all add up to “a vast geographical and ethnographical museum.”14 In hopes of accelerating their efforts and

Empire Lost: Britain, the Dominions and the Second World War

by Andrew Stewart  · 1 Nov 2008  · 637pp  · 117,453 words

the very least, 'would have up and left the Empire, and the scream would have been heard all the way to Whitehall without benefit of submarine cable or wireless aerial'. He thought the DO faced an 'impossible job' and that New Zealand was not entirely without blame in terms of what had

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State

by Glenn Greenwald  · 12 May 2014  · 253pp  · 75,772 words

with two U.S. telecom providers (cover terms ARTIFICE and WOLFPOINT).” Beyond its access to US-based choke points, “the STORMBREW program also manages two submarine cable landing access sites; one on the USA west coast (cover term, BRECKENRIDGE), and the other on the USA east coast (cover term QUAIL-CREEK).” As

The Rise of the Network Society

by Manuel Castells  · 31 Aug 1996  · 843pp  · 223,858 words

, it was only in the 1830s (William Cooke in England, Samuel Morse in America) that the electric telegraph was established, and in 1851 the first submarine cable laid out between Dover and Calais (Garratt 1958); see also Sharlin (1967); Mokyr (1990). 38 Forbes (1958: 148). 39 A good history of the origins

Platform Capitalism

by Nick Srnicek  · 22 Dec 2016  · 116pp  · 31,356 words

the mainstreaming of the internet in the early years of the new millennium. Concretely, this investment meant that millions of miles of fibre-optic and submarine cables were laid out, major advances in software and network design were established, and large investments in databases and servers were made. This process also accelerated

Heaven's Command (Pax Britannica)

by Jan Morris  · 22 Dec 2010  · 699pp  · 192,704 words

of your affectionate husband.’1 10 Majuba proved an abdication in a wider sense, too. The news reached London the following day, by a new submarine cable from the Cape, and the War Office at once resolved to send further reinforcements to South Africa from India, Ceylon, Bermuda and Britain, and to