Tags: undersea

Extremely offline: what happened when a Pacific island was cut off from the internet | Tonga | The Guardian

A fascinating look at the importance of undersea cables, taken from a new book called The Web Beneath the Waves.

How Undersea Cables Connect the Global Internet

Cables!

The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat

A fascinating in-depth look at the maintenance of undersea cables:

The industry responsible for this crucial work traces its origins back far beyond the internet, past even the telephone, to the early days of telegraphy. It’s invisible, underappreciated, analog.

Snook’s Law:

It’s a truism that people don’t think about infrastructure until it breaks, but they tend not to think about the fixing of it, either.

Undersea Cables by Rishi Sunak [PDF]

Years before becoming Prime Minister of the UK, Rishi Sunak wrote this report, Undersea Cables: Indispensable, insecure.

How the Internet Travels Across Oceans - The New York Times

CABLES!

The People’s Cloud

A documentary by Matt Parker (brother of Andy) that follows in the footsteps of people like Andrew Blum, James Bridle, and Ingrid Burrington, going in search of the physical locations of the internet, and talking to the people who maintain it. Steven Pemberton makes an appearance in the first and last of five episodes:

1. What is the Cloud vs What Existed Before?
2. Working out the Internet: it’s a volume game
3. The Submarine Cable Network
4. How Much Data Is There?
5. Convergence

The music makes it feel quite sinister.

Surfacing

An interactive map of the world’s undersea cables, to accompany Nicole Starosielski’s book The Undersea Network.

Submarine Cable Map 2015

This year’s map from TeleGeography is looking lovely.

The Secure Transport of Light on booktwo.org

A beautiful piece by James on the history of light as a material for communication …and its political overtones in today’s world.

What is light when it is information rather than illumination? What is it when it is not perceived by the human eye? Deep beneath the streets and oceans, what is illuminated by the machines, and how are we changed by this illumination?

Submarine Cable Map

This year’s TeleGeography map of the undersea network looks beautiful—inspired by old maps. I love the way that latency between countries is shown as inset constellations.

Latency: The New Web Performance Bottleneck - igvita.com

This is just wonderful! It combines almost all of my recent obsessions into one unified post: website performance (particularly on mobile) and the locations of undersea cables. The interactive map is the icing on the cake.

The world’s undersea internet cables - interactive | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Explore the shape of the underwater world of internet backbones.