Submitted 3 months ago by snausagesinablanket@lemmy.world to [deleted]
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
That is a curious enumeration strategy
The US has been able to send bandwidth via laser beam long distances for a while. I wonder if they could set up a network this way to bypass any bad cables. Even if only while they are being repaired.
Not across oceans though. Earth is curved.
Lasers work really well in space for secure sat-to-sat data links, but are a lot less viable on Earth’s surface due to diffraction and weather, nevermind the limits of the visible horizon for any height of a communications tower. For pretty much any scenario where laser comms would be considered, microwave RF links would likely be just as good, cheaper, and more commonly deployed and understood by telecom engineers. The only exception is when absurdly high bandwidths are needed, which is where lasers rule.
But using RF links across thousands of kilometers of oceanic waters? For that, you must construct additional pylons on floating islands to repeat the signal. Otherwise, the only RF signals that could reach land would be too low frequency to carry much bandwidth.
For reference, when the German Aerospace Center (DLR) set the world record in 2016 for free-space optical communications, they achieved 1.72 Tbits/sec over a distance of 10.45 km. Most optical systems observe a bandwidth/distance relationship, where at best, shooting the signal farther means less available bandwidth, or more bandwidth if brought closer. This is a related to the Shannon-Hartley theorem, since the limiting factor is optical noise.
So if 1.72 Tbits/sec at 10 km is the best they achieved in free air in 2016, then that pales in comparison to the undersea fibre cables of 2006, where a section of the SHEFA-2 Scottish-Faroese cable runs unamplified for 390 km and moves 570 Gbits/sec aggregate.
In short, free-space lasers are fast and long-distance. But lasers within fibre cables are much faster and cover even longer distances.
A cable-cutting war will be absolutely devastating to the global economy. It’s the modern equivalent of Mutually Assured Destruction. There are few viable contingency plans.
I say this as a telecom wonk: hope and pray and vote so that war never comes.
You’re not emphasizing the MAD part of it enough.
Russia’s threats are all thermonuclear, fuck everyone, we’re all going to die, kind of threats.
Nukes being the first, then they were saber rattling about satellite destruction, now under sea cables.
But go ahead and watch Russia cut an undersea NATO cable and suddenly have the entirety of NATO bearing down on them for starting a war. Or watch them start shooting down satellites and ruin their own positioning and communications systems and make them a pariah to literally every country on earth that might need a satellite for something.
Russia is not strong enough domestically to do much of anything. They are certainly not strong enough domestically to thrive on their own, and literally all the cards they have to play end with the entire world turning against them.
I say this as a telecom wonk: hope and pray and vote so that war never comes.
All the more reason to support piracy.
Piracy has nothing to do with global supply chains.
I’m pretty sure it would result in the US internet being isolated from the rest of the worlds’
Which actually works against Putin since that means his troll farms also get cut off, meaning less new material for the useful idiots to keep other useful idiots freshly indoctrinated with.
his troll farms also get cut off Why don’t we already have a hardware firewall for this?
Because generally where the West can extend their communications the people tend to provoke change for the better.
Cutting Russia off entirely for the troll farms is locking Russians into a Russian curated echo chamber, or a least doing that to an even worse extent than Putin is already trying to do himself.
I’m pretty sure it would result in the US internet being isolated from the rest of the worlds’
except for most of North and South America.
South America probably uses sea cables.
Mid year 2018, maybe it was 2019, there was a massive internet outage. Closest guesstimate to the causes was a truck with their boom up ran through an intersection clipping fiber and power lines, and a fiber bundle was accidentally cut in a separate incident, this was all state side. Internet went down for nearly every ISP, services dead, country wide it was found we don’t have redundancy like we thought. You see, when internet lines are built out, the lines are divided up to different owners and leases, those third parties sell backup internet services to major isp’s, but no one was checking if the backup was running across the same infrastructure at any point, sales was selling, and the backup lines worked and we never had a full bundle break previously that was carrying main and backup bundles. When this outage happened, it hit Russia as well. Russia had an internet outage because of 2 bunlde breaks in the US. This tells me they are linked to the US network, and might infact be capable of doing multiple nefarious activities that made use of the wide open hole we had in our infrastructure. Now I don’t know if our infrastructure was patched, they kept that above most peoples pay grade. But the weakness was there, and it was on display to the entire world plain as day. They could either poison our networks/DNS/routing tables/etc with their high-speed connections, or just use it as a heartbeat to see the success of internet based attacks.
By internet based, I meant attacking the internet itself, not attacking thru the internet, my mistype
I would imagine that it would be equally devastating to Putin to cut the cables as it would be to anybody else. I want to believe that he’s bluffing, trolling everybody to get their attention and reactions.
The comments are from June. If they were going to do it, they’d have done it by now
Something like 1% of internet traffic is by satellite…
Basically none. The satellite link isn’t getting traffic directly between you and the server you are reaching - the satellite just relays the data to the nearest ground station that then uses the normal fibre network to get the rest of the way.
Even if you managed to reconfigure starlink to be a peering network rather than an access network, you’d still have the issue that the starlink network as a whole has orders of magnitude less bandwidth than even one under sea cable
They’re not going to take out the internet lol. At least if you’re not in Ukraine that is.
A large amount but at 500ms+ latency it might as well be useless for most applications.
oddly enough i think the internet would have to behave in a federated way
content would need to be cached in connected areas and we would need to optimize use of the satellite connections to propagate content between federated islands
It would give them a boost if the cable cutting were continuosly occurring to a point of crippling then they may turn back the clock to what they have in military installations that’s an Intranet a closed network but closed because they choose for it to be it doesn’t actually have to be if they host large servers in areas that work on a local area connection (LAN) and users connect to those servers to effectively use the internet you could have frontend user interfaces to pick and choose services a search engine and file server etc etc, you could ramp up large scale wifi and or satellite dish style relays or large Antenna array equivelencies of such a thing capable of sending out the signal across an entire country and possibly beyond that…in fact theoretically it would be far safer to do that than having the current setup we use, provided encryption was extremely high p2p end to end as well, it would be a case of if the owner says no you don’t get in unless then you don’t, at that stage unless your in the country on site physically to incercept the transmitted data and break the code to access it any way then you can’t use it thus international countries cannot communicate or attack on it or inside of it, they just transmit the data outbound to other countries as and when required not feed everything through cables that every person ccan physically cut or attack the users passing along them it would prevent data being intercepted for the most part . The speeds would be confined to the relays speed and your connecting devices bandwidths as well so potentially ultra fast as well if the hardware improved further, that’s is a way of loosing cables for good doing that at the same time theoretically. It will not happen though the world would say enough’s enough before that stage of cable destruction were possible to achieve by the Russian’s
Won’t do this cause it’ll hurt em friends Marc, Elon and Donald too.
I think most of our critical ones are in the Atlantic. And I don’t think China would be too happy with them taking them out in the Pacific.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 3 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 3 months ago
I think you’re greatly underestimating how many non large corporations just host their shit in US-East 1.
xavier666@lemm.ee 3 months ago
*how many non large non US corporations
someguy3@lemmy.world 3 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 3 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.