Odd Lots
Samanth Subramanian on the Undersea Cables That Keep the Internet Alive
May 13, 202642 min · 9,275 words
Show notes
In 2006, then-Senator Ted Stevens coined an infamous term for how to understand the internet: It's a "series of tubes." The funny thing is, that's a fairly accurate description. Underneath the world's oceans, miles and miles of fiber optic-cables send packets of information from one location to the next, serving as the backbone of the internet as know it.
Highlighted moments
two out of every three new cables were being funded and owned either in part or in full by one of these four tech companies.
“roughly 100 cables get cut around the world. Most of these are accidents. There might be a ship that throws its anchor overboard and cuts a cable by accident, or it might be that a fishing boat is trawling the seabed and it hooks a cable and snags it and cuts it.”
“There hasn't been a new cable laid between China and the US direct in years, even though traffic between these two countries has never been greater. So you have to route everything now through the Philippines or through Singapore.”
Transcript
Transcript not available for this episode yet.
More from Odd Lots
Why Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman Built The World's Largest Computer Chip
May 21, 202651 min
Deutsche Bank's Ozan Tarman and Aditya Singhal on Understanding the Macro Risks
May 19, 202628 min
Why the Price of Oil, Beef, Electricity, and Everything Else Makes No Sense
May 18, 202630 min
Stripe's John Collison on How Agentic Commerce Will Reshape the Internet
May 16, 202647 min
Why SocGen's Albert Edwards Sees Double-Digit Inflation Coming Back
May 15, 202653 min