Comment by rob74
6 months ago
Right from the start, the tone of the presentation struck a wrong kind of chord with me. "The world's most important infrastructure"? Dear author, try living without electricity or fresh water for a few days, then I'll ask you again...
I thought the same, but then, after a few pages, was this:
> If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function. The financial system would immediately freeze. Currency trading would stop; stock exchanges would close. Banks and governments would be unable to move funds between countries because the Swift and US interbank systems both rely on submarine cables to settle over $10 trillion in transactions each day. In large swaths of the world, people would discover their credit cards no longer worked and ATMs would dispense no cash. As US Federal Reserve staff director Steve Malphrus said at a 2009 cable security conference, “When communications networks go down, the financial services sector does not grind to a halt. It snaps to a halt.”
> Corporations would lose the ability to coordinate overseas manufacturing and logistics. Seemingly local institutions would be paralyzed as outsourced accounting, personnel, and customer service departments went dark. Governments, which rely on the same cables as everyone else for the vast majority of their communications, would be largely cut off from their overseas outposts and each other. Satellites would not be able to pick up even half a percent of the traffic. Contemplating the prospect of a mass cable cut to the UK, then-MP Rishi Sunak concluded, “Short of nuclear or biological warfare, it is difficult to think of a threat that could be more justifiably described as existential.”
You could still argue with "the world's most important" claim, but this makes it clear that it is at least somewhat defensible.
But that's rather overstating the case, isn't it? If all these cables simultaneously break, we'd switch to Starlink (at much lower total bandwidth), and international communication would drop in volume, with the most valuable uses winning.
Millisecond-level currency trading would cease, but second- or minute-level trading would continue, and that would not dramatically destroy economies.
ATMs of foreign banks might stop working; local banks should continue.
Watching video from a foreign server would no longer be possible, but that's not the end of the world.
And so on. It would slow many things down, some things would stop, but it wouldn't be the end of modern civilization.
> we'd switch to Starlink (at much lower total bandwidth)
That's some kind of understatement, assuming that TFA is correct:
> Satellites would not be able to pick up even half a percent of the traffic.
I very much doubt that the trading systems that today rely on international data cables can be run via phones and voice communications, and I also wonder just how much of the phone system (even domestically within the USA) paradoxically relies in submarine cables.
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It's an interesting, well-written article written in good faith.
I think small semantic issues like this should be ignored so we can enjoy worthwhile discussion.