Satellite internet may be slow, but there’s a good chance a lot of traffic could get routed through it.
It would really only separate the Americas from Europe/Africa/Asia
Comment on What would happen if all undersea cables got severed worldwide simultaneously?
Toes@ani.social 4 weeks ago
I’m sure a lot of things would go wrong.
But for an internet perspective there’s a protocol called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) that would attempt to heal all the broken routes by rerouting through what’s not broken. A bit of an oversimplification but if everything goes right the internet will continue to work.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 weeks ago
deegeese@sopuli.xyz 4 weeks ago
Japan and Australia would like a word.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 weeks ago
Well I guess they would just have to wait to get that word in since their undersea cables were cut.
1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 4 weeks ago
Also Europe… A significant amount of Europe’s content is hosted in UK & Ireland (AWS EU-West) and Sweden (AWS EU-North) which would mean the two remaining major datacentres (Germany and Italy) would struggle
trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
If all cables get severed that means a huge amount of data will be rerouted to a couple of satellite links. I wonder if they could handle the DDoS
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 4 weeks ago
That’s quite a rosy outlook.
sofrep.com/…/how-global-internet-access-relies-on…
If this is accurate, 97% of global internet data is carried through undersea cables.
Satellite systems for general, comsumer (non military) internet purposes do exist, but their total bandwidth is essentially negligible in this scenario.
What would happen is:
First, everything on the internet would dramatically slow down and/or 404 due to built in auto timeout failures.
As BGP kicks in, this may lessen very slightly, but systems that mirror data across servers on different continents would basically be unable to synchronize.
Systems with servers in only one location would basically be unnaccessible to anyone more than … ballpark, a few hundred miles away.
International banking and transactions and would be forced to stop, otherwise they’d be getting massively out of date info, wrecking the legitimacy of their balance sheets.
International video calls stop working.
Voice only calls and email may work, but with great delay for emails, and a roulette wheel spin for your call going through.
You’re basically looking at the Tracer Tong ending from Deus Ex, maybe not quite as bad in certain areas that effectively prioritize certain kinds of traffic and rapidly enact effective mitigation strategies…
But best case, for probably a very long time, you’re looking at an internet that is mostly fragmented and highly geographically localized.
… and thats assuming the world’s highly globalized and interdependent economy doesn’t just collapse and never really come back.
Almost all logistics is now impossible, and almost all logistics runs on the Just In Time paradigm… ot is very fragile, very reliant on things working on time, with very little margin of error and stored emergency reserves.
Remember when the Evergrande blocked the Suez, and this caused logistics nightmares around the world that persisted for years?
Imagine that multiplied by about 10,000 or 100,000.