Ninety-nine percent of international internet traffic flows through cables stretched across the ocean floor. Demand for these cables is at an all-time high as the world becomes more dependent on cloud computing and AI. But there’s only one company in America that’s capable of both making and laying them.
We visited its 73-year-old factory and went onboard a multimillion-dollar cable-laying ship to see how the company is keeping up and why our data still needs to travel thousands of feet under the sea.
00:00 – Intro
01:08 – How Subsea Cables Work
02:02 – How Cables Are Made
04:59 – The History of Subsea Cables
07:00 – Big Tech Takeover
08:22 – Onboard the Cable Ship
10:14 – How Cable Is Laid
10:52 – Geopolitical Tensions
12:40 – Cable Breaks
14:26 – Cable Sabotage
14:09 – Satellites
14:43 – Credits
——————————————————
#internetcable #cablelaying #subseaengineering #cables #bigbusiness
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Also read “He wrote the bible on the modern internet. He’s horrified at what he sees in 2026”: https://bit.ly/4ibgWBU
And “Each state’s infrastructure, ranked worst to best”: https://bit.ly/4yi0OUb
cool
Un 49mo😅
Great documentary .
You are way off on some of your information.
The fest telegraph cable along across the Atlantic was laid in 1865, by Brunel’s magnificent ship the Great Eastern.
This was nearly a century before the first American cable across the Atlantic.
RE
So, if the cable breaks, how do you know at which point it broke?!
Starlink is going to put these folks out of business, sad, but this does seem kind of archaic.
funny enough (one day into release of this video) IRGC is planning to hit the cables in persian gulf . timing is almost perfect
Nearly 2/3 of the speed of light; Einstein would be proud of this!
There is a wonderful essay by Neal Stephenson about global internet and submarine fiber-optic cables called “Mother Earth Mother Board”. It was originally published in December 1996 as a massive, 42,000-word cover story for Wired Magazine.
It was later reprinted and compiled into his 2012 book of non-fiction essays and interviews titled Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing.
If you can read only one essay in you life, read this one! If you can read more, read all of Neal’s work! Trust me, I am a doctor.
Cut all lines leading to india
So how do they know which part of the cable is damaged?
Data centers 😂
Russia: “would be a shame if someone where to accidentally drag an anchor across those fragile cables”
Looks like an area for deep sea robotics.
If they was actually fighting each other and not just getting the peasants to do it, communication and data transfer would be the first thing to go and its just resting on the sea bed. Right yeah OK 😂😂
why did the speedboat run backwards?
As Fiber optic Technician I approve this.