I worked for an L1 blockchain for a couple years and while the term "decentralized" is bandied about a bit too much, reading articles like this does underscore how vulnerable global traffic is.
e.g. some EVM chains have a majority of "stake" in either one country or several adjacent countries (particularly in Asia). A cable cut there, which the article points out has happened, can lead to the blockchain getting cut off or even halting.
I think the issue is that centralization is more economical due to scale, but that assumes all else (geopolitics or other black swan events) don't impact things.
We saw a similar thing with supply chains and chip suppliers.
10 years ago the talk of hackers partitioning the internet to double spend BTC all seemed a bit far fetched. But now crypto has trillions in market cap and governments involved -- governments that sometimes cut network cables just to send a message. The "means" and "motive" exploded by 100x, did anyone find a way to close the "opportunity" or did people just stop talking about it lol?
> reading articles like this does underscore how vulnerable global traffic is.
Then also remember that the internet haven't seen a global outage since forever, worst parts have been when some submarine cables break and traffic has to route around it, but never has the entire thing fully went down. Considering how most of it is built with bandaids, silver-tape and WD40, it's surprising it is as resilient as it is.
I work on autonomous submarines that image the seafloor, and let me tell you it is very hard to engineer deep ocean systems. Just operationally, testing things in rolling waves is a brutal job. Arguably at parity with space as an engineering design environment.
I forget who said it, but there's a quote about how _of course_ we know more about space than the bottom of the ocean - in space we only have to deal with one atmosphere.
I (briefly) worked as a test engineer on a similar kind of contract. To meet the UX requirements for the system we were building, it had to be reliably operable in sea state 7+. The customer wanted touch screen interfaces. I exited that project when they were looking for volunteers to go spend time offshore in the Gulf of Alaska in bad weather, because that was the test environment they could find that met the requirements. Insanity.
Everyone in the industry I can find including people who do recycling of submarine cables. It seems that cross sections are sometimes given away as gifts as part of a project but are really hard to find.
Underwater cables have been one of the more awe inspiring things for me. I know nothing about them but they seem SO crazy and yet we have them running all across the oceans. .·°՞( ̑ ᗜ ̑ )՞°·.
How practical would be a mesh of satellites shooting lasers at each other, compared to undersea fiber-optic cables?
Alternatively, is there a wavelength of light to which water is completely transparent? Can we shoot lasers of that frequency through open water instead of through cables?
Maybe something that could be mounted on blue whales?
Someone else with more experience could chime in but I would put it at less practical due to latency (sats are very high up), bandwidth (one laser vs a bundle of 1000s of fiber optic cables), cost (to overcome latency you need a closer orbit which requires more sats), single point of failure, lifespan, intercepted communications, solar flares… and that’s just off the top of my head.
I don't actually think latency would be that much worse.
Of course, it depends on the altitude of the satellite but speed of light in a fiber optic is only ~2/3rds of speed of light in a vacuum so you can afford some detour
If you figure out how to make cheap vacuum cables you will probably become very rich.
But otherwise chains of microwave links does get much closer to c in applications where you want absolute lowest latency (or much more commonly, when digging a fiber line is too expensive)
You probably can’t get under 500 km orbit, so 2000 km round trip is the shortest you can do between you and a ground based server. That’s 150 ms minimum round trip latency.
starlink sats are some of the lowest orbiting satellites in space - 330-370km for v3. this helps latency as well as easy deorbit at end of life. the v3 sats have multiple 400 gbps lasers for meshing... I can't decide if your comment is sarcasm or not actually because starlink is fully functional and doesn't have any of those issues
Starshield (military arm of SpaceX/Starlink) does this for satellite imaging.
Normally in imaging, you first need to get the satellite over the location you want to image, at the right time - then let it orbit over a downlink location.
There are companies making a lot of money by having downlink capability in useful places (eg: near the poles) - combined with a fat pipe to the Internet.
With Starshield, the satellites talk to each other over laser - so the satellite doesn't have to wait to travel to a downlink location - just relay to of that is already there.
So for certain special cases it can help -
but I think you'll find a cable stuffed with multimodal fiber had vastly more bandwidth.
Depends on a lot of things, but most undersea cables have several fibers (typically around 10 fibers), and each fiber runs many wavelengths (typically 40 or 80). Whatever your bandwidth is per wavelength (there are lots of options, at different costs, up to maybe 400gbps) that's a huge amount of bandwidth to replace.
Space lasers probably don't do multiple wavelengths, and aiming a lot of laser transceivers is going to be challenging.
> Alternatively, is there a wavelength of light to which water is completely transparent? Can we shoot lasers of that frequency through open water instead of through cables?
Even if you could, that's only going to work for short hops, long distance fiber includes repeaters every so often (50-100 km) to deal with loss, it would be tricky to build those under the sea ... and you need to power them, which means a cable, might as well include fiber with your power cable.
My son's school computing teacher was convinced that these oceanic communication cables float on the surface - to the extent they had a bit argument about it in class. I'm not sure how the teacher thought ships navigated around them.
I found https://smc.peering.tw/ fascinating. It shows an up to date status of submarine links to Taiwan and you can see many of them are having outages. Even more interesting is the historical view showing that the system operates in an always partly degraded regime
It was laid in 1858. During its brief three-week lifespan, only 732 messages (amounting to roughly 400 total telegrams) were successfully transmitted before the cable died.
ortusdux | 5 hours ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d99_h30swtM
alexpotato | 5 hours ago
e.g. some EVM chains have a majority of "stake" in either one country or several adjacent countries (particularly in Asia). A cable cut there, which the article points out has happened, can lead to the blockchain getting cut off or even halting.
hylaride | 5 hours ago
We saw a similar thing with supply chains and chip suppliers.
scottyah | 5 hours ago
smallmancontrov | 3 hours ago
embedding-shape | 4 hours ago
Then also remember that the internet haven't seen a global outage since forever, worst parts have been when some submarine cables break and traffic has to route around it, but never has the entire thing fully went down. Considering how most of it is built with bandaids, silver-tape and WD40, it's surprising it is as resilient as it is.
andrewrn | 4 hours ago
EuanReid | 4 hours ago
hermitcrab | 3 hours ago
A difference of one atmosphere?
notimetorelax | 2 hours ago
Tangurena2 | 2 hours ago
charcircuit | 2 hours ago
structural | 3 hours ago
blobdole | 3 hours ago
jgrahamc | 4 hours ago
JMiao | 4 hours ago
jgrahamc | 3 hours ago
wuliwong | 4 hours ago
konschubert | 4 hours ago
Like statistically impossibly unlucky.
mschuster91 | an hour ago
Razengan | 4 hours ago
Alternatively, is there a wavelength of light to which water is completely transparent? Can we shoot lasers of that frequency through open water instead of through cables?
Maybe something that could be mounted on blue whales?
wcfields | 3 hours ago
joha4270 | 3 hours ago
Of course, it depends on the altitude of the satellite but speed of light in a fiber optic is only ~2/3rds of speed of light in a vacuum so you can afford some detour
Razengan | 3 hours ago
That made me wonder: Why can't we use vacuum cables?
(the sort of questions I should probably be bothering an LLM with.. someone should make a LMGPTTFY)
LoganDark | 2 hours ago
Hollow-core fiber is basically this!
> LMGPTTFY
"let me go prompt that for you" or "let me GPT that for you"?
joha4270 | 2 hours ago
But otherwise chains of microwave links does get much closer to c in applications where you want absolute lowest latency (or much more commonly, when digging a fiber line is too expensive)
pkaye | 14 minutes ago
christina97 | an hour ago
auspiv | 3 hours ago
skippyboxedhero | 2 hours ago
bandwidth would indeed be worse
joha4270 | 3 hours ago
e12e | 2 hours ago
Normally in imaging, you first need to get the satellite over the location you want to image, at the right time - then let it orbit over a downlink location.
There are companies making a lot of money by having downlink capability in useful places (eg: near the poles) - combined with a fat pipe to the Internet.
With Starshield, the satellites talk to each other over laser - so the satellite doesn't have to wait to travel to a downlink location - just relay to of that is already there.
So for certain special cases it can help - but I think you'll find a cable stuffed with multimodal fiber had vastly more bandwidth.
toast0 | an hour ago
Space lasers probably don't do multiple wavelengths, and aiming a lot of laser transceivers is going to be challenging.
> Alternatively, is there a wavelength of light to which water is completely transparent? Can we shoot lasers of that frequency through open water instead of through cables?
Even if you could, that's only going to work for short hops, long distance fiber includes repeaters every so often (50-100 km) to deal with loss, it would be tricky to build those under the sea ... and you need to power them, which means a cable, might as well include fiber with your power cable.
pchristensen | 3 hours ago
Tangurena2 | 2 hours ago
hermitcrab | 3 hours ago
wrxd | an hour ago
reincoder | 13 minutes ago
It was laid in 1858. During its brief three-week lifespan, only 732 messages (amounting to roughly 400 total telegrams) were successfully transmitted before the cable died.