Would Starlink and other satellite ISP’s be able to mitigate some of the traffic?
I suppose:
1a. that’d be a lot of cables to take off
2b. many cables are terrestrial
3c. Putin would tick off other BRICS members and other countries
4d. ship-to-ship—maybe get some airplanes and balloons involved
5e. American Navy attacks Russian vessels cutting cables, and tell Putin to stop this folly
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Almost none of it.
The amount of data flowing through undersea cables around the world is insane compared to the inter-satellite links available.
That being said, a lot of data that you use as a consumer on a daily basis doesn’t pass through any undersea cable at all. It’s more of a business problem than an individual problem.
The majority of the websites or online services you access are locally hosted on your own continent. Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, etc. all have local servers. Even for video games, most of the traffic is local just due to lag issues caused by too much distance.
What would break? Banking and financial institutions transferring money to or from overseas institutions to complete investments and loans, Supply lines communications (Like e-mailing or calling a factory in China from the US), International shipping, Flight tracking, etc.
While the satellites could take over for some of that, what would likely happen is specific companies would bid up the price for that limited capacity, and less financially valuable uses like being able to call or e-mail your grandma in Thailand just wouldn’t work.
Kiwi@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I think you’re greatly underestimating how many non large corporations just host their shit in US-East 1.
xavier666@lemm.ee 2 months ago
*how many non large non US corporations
someguy3@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Wouldn’t you think video streaming would be the first to go? Also music and podcasts. First in line is critical things like banking, credit cards, etc. It’s actually convenient that the most important things are the smallest data size. The problem I see is that so many companies are putting everything on the cloud.
assembly@lemmy.world 2 months ago
You have to remember that the cloud is just a series of data centers owned by cloud providers. If you are Netflix, you’re not hosting Stranger Things for audiences in the US from the EU. You have a copy of it in both places and leverage AWS regions in each area to server geographically closer users (it’s typically called latency based routing). If the undersea cables are cut, the EU still watches Netflix because the content doesn’t need to travel undersea, it’s already in the EU, same thing in the US. The challenge comes in at the end of the month when people pay their Netflix bills and the banks needs to process international payments. End users are largely not impacted by direct service outages but big companies are.