Why are big technology companies in the race to take the lead over each other under sea?

 

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"The fact that you can post a picture on Facebook or a video on YouTube and people can see it anywhere in the world is amazing, but for all that behind the scenes and a lot of things under the sea. It is needed.

It's easy to overlook the fact that our access to the Internet depends on thousands of miles of cable laid in the world's oceans. They provide plumbing for the Internet and run 98% of Internet traffic.

Some cables connect neighboring countries, such as the 131 km long cable between Ireland and the United Kingdom. Or the Asian-American Gateway Cable that connects the continents, which is 20,000 kilometers long.

Internet cables have tiny wires inside them and they are like optical fibers in which data travels like light, like tension in hair. Each cable will have more layers of protective coating to protect these many thin wires or fibers.

One problem, according to Daniel Sousa, director of Subcom, an international company, is that "the entire cable system needs to be developed and tested as a complete system."

Didier Dallard, head of Orange Marine, another international company, says cables are tested on shore before being loaded onto ships, which can take up to two weeks.

The company operates six submarine cable or wiring ships, one of which, the Renee Descartes, is capable of laying 6,000 km of cable.

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Telecom companies once did not support such complex and expensive projects, but now the big international technology companies have begun to invest heavily in laying underwater cables.

Telegraph estimates that content providers such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft have spent 1.5 1.5 billion on cable over the past five years.

Alan Molden says the simple reason is that they are demanding more bandwidth.

Google in particular is investing in this work. The cable that connects Chile and the United States is called Corey, while Donant Cable, a partnership of a company called Subcom, connects the United States and France to Orange, a cable landing station in St. Louis, France. Based in Hillary de Reese.

Two more stations of this nature will be completed soon.

The Aquino cable runs from Portugal to the west coast of Africa and South Africa. In addition, the Grace Hopper Cable connects the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain.

Ensuring the availability and accessibility of the Internet facility to which we have become accustomed and improving it are two of the major reasons for this investment.

But the investment is also being made in the Google Cloud Computing service, which is facing stiff competition from major technology companies.

This rivalry or conflict has given rise to the term 'cloud war' which is a war of supremacy.

Cloud computing has become a big business as big companies have started using Amazon, AWS and Microsoft's Ezro to meet their computing and digital storage needs.

So is it okay for big companies like Google to have all the digital connections in their hands?

Alan Molden says the cables are owned by private companies so no one has a monopoly on them. It has many users. All of these consumer companies use the same infrastructure.

The scope or capability of these private cables is not only sold to Google, some capabilities are also used by various telecom companies.

Orange, for example, is offering its customers extra coverage on the Dunnet cable.

Alan Molden says the main reason is that his bandwidth is in high demand compared to other companies. Google in particular is investing in laying several of its cables.

Molden likens submarine cable to motorways, where high-speed Google and Facebook trucks travel, and small vehicles run on the same motorways.

The satellite has been the subject of debate for decades over whether there could be an alternative to submarine cable.

London-based satellite operator OneWeb has recently launched its sixth phase of satellites, while Elon Musk's SpaceX is investing in satellite technology and his project is called the StarLink project.

It would be useful to compare the two technologies

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Satellite is the most effective means of accessing the Internet in remote areas as it is very expensive to provide internet access in these areas. But cables are best suited for transmitting more data.

Molden said the exchange of heavy data between the world's largest data centers would be possible only with underwater cable.

But reliance on cable has pushed big technology companies into geopolitics.

In March of this year, Facebook abandoned cable laying between California and Hong Kong. Facebook reportedly did so under pressure from US national security officials.

On the other hand, the Royal Navy has announced that it is building a ship that will monitor and protect important cables from a defensive point of view. The ship is being built in response to the growing threat of underwater operations.

Despite these difficulties, one of the most common problems with cables is their maintenance and repair. This cable environment or humanActivities can cause breakdowns that need to be repaired immediately.

An Orange Marine Cableship, or submarine wiring ship, has been repairing underwater wires off the coast of the Democratic Republic of Congo in recent days.

These wires are more vulnerable to human activity and movement. Such problems often occur in the oceans where fishermen set nets to catch fish. Channel Iceland's Internet connection was temporarily cut off from the rest of the world in 2016 when wires broke from the anchor of a ship.

These wires need to be repaired immediately to minimize disruption.