  What do you see in the picture above? Look's like a bunch of seaweed and flotsam you say? Well believe it or not this is a picture of a cable landing site. A submarine communications cable specifically. Well I must admit prior to this week I had never heard of such a thing really. Of course I guess at one time or another I had heard of a trans-atlantic cable such as ones used for phone communications and such but I guess a bit naively I had thought in this day and age of the global Internet that such cables were a back-up and not something used heavily each day.
Boy was I wrong. In the past weekly several of these many submarine cables have been torn or disabled at sea effectively hindering a lot of Asia and the Middle East's ability to communicate both by phone and via the Internet. If you click the picture to the left you will see that the world is literally interconnected with these cables. Some of them spanning many 10's of thousands of miles. While like the rest of the Internet there is a certain amount of redundancy if enough of these cables were to be damaged the Internet could be severely crippled. In the past week there have been 3 such crippling incidences which makes you wonder was it truly a bunch of ships dropping anchor in the wrong place at the wrong time or something more orchestrated? As Alexander Harrowell pointed out this past week: Alexander Harrowell remarked today on the message board of the North American Network Operators Group that these five points remain strategically important today, because of the landing stations where these international undersea cables intersect. The paths that international data traffic take today remain heavily rooted in the paths of colonial conquest of the 15th century British empire. "The similarity," Harrowell wrote, "is truly uncanny." Labels: Editorial
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