Your email and website exist because of Ocean Cables, a hose at the bottom of the ocean. Not “the cloud.” Not satellites beaming your Amazon Shopping down from space. The internet has more than 600 Ocean Cables lying on the ocean floor, stretching over 900,000 miles, carrying nearly every email and stock trade on Earth.
Near shore, Ocean Cables are armored and buried. In the deep, each cable is about the width of a garden hose. Inside, the fibers are as thin as a human hair.
That hair carries your banking information. Roughly $10 trillion in transactions crosses these cables every day. Your paycheck has been to the bottom of the Atlantic more times than Jacques Cousteau.
About 200 cable faults happen per year, and boats and anchors cause two-thirds. In late 2024, a cargo ship’s anchor dragged the seabed over 100 miles, cutting two Baltic cables. Not an oops, it was like a plow.
When Ocean Cables break, a repair ship drags up the ends, crews splice them by hand and lower the cable back down in the ocean. The whole planet has about 60 cable ships, but less than 20 for repairs.
The internet running your bank and before-bed FaceTime is maintained by a crew smaller than some school districts.
Can Starlink replace this? Nope.
More than 10,000 Starlink satellites are up there. When a cable gets cut, they’re a real lifeline. They kept Ukraine online when the wires got bombed.
But a lifeline isn’t the main line. Add up every satellite from every company and you get about 50 terabits of data per second. The cables move around 8,750 terabits. Do the math and the entire satellite network, all combined, carries less than 1% of what the cables do. Satellites are a rounding error.
Amazingly, even satellites don’t escape the hoses. Those signals land at ground stations and plug into fiber cables.
It’s downright miraculous that the internet runs on a hair inside a hose at the bottom of the sea. And happily, it brought you this message!