Even with an orbit full of satellites, we still need cables (big under water cables).

Updated on March 18, 2009

Have you ever caught wind of those random internet blackouts across portions of Europe or the Mid-East? Well it more often than not has to do with the trans-continental under water internet cable being disturbed. Never heard of it? Here's a brief example from February 8, 2008 of how bad things can be if only a handful of these cables fail:

"Undersea cables have made big news in the last few days, ever since several cables were cut last week near Dubai and Alexandria, disrupting Internet service all over the Middle East. (The latest news: It looks like a ship’s anchor sliced one of the cables. Oops!) The accident draws attention to how much our modern lives depend on unseen cables—just three inches thick and buried under sand—that most of us have never even thought about. There are hundreds of thousands of miles of these things snaking under our seas, with even more on the way." ~from a Popular Science article

Popular Science thought a six page article was prudent, I'll sum it up in one. To start things off, have a look at the below pic supplied by telegeography.com.

Courtesy of www.telegeography.com || See a larger version here

I know you probably won't be able to read most the info in the map, but I wanted to give you a good representation on just where and how many of these cables are running through the world's oceans.

So back to the main point of this article, who makes sure these fire hose size cables stay intact and repair damages that may occur? Well the answer is not as simple as the question. It is continuously monitored by teams of dedicated engineers, mariners, technicians, and even $10-million remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) which spend almost every waking hour scouring the the open ocean.

Don't worry it would take a lot more than a nick in one cable to permanently knock out your internet. There are dozens of contingencies in place to help get your hours of youtube, facebook, live streaming presidential election coverage, spam email, and relentless popup windows (that somehow get around our "advanced" browser built-in popup blockers). Now that I've answered this potentially complex topic with a grossly over-simplified summarization (as I promised), you can sleep peacefully tonight knowing your Google search has a 96% (made up number) of being there in the morning.

(P.S. - Check out this link to see just where (geographical) your internet signal really travels when your surfing.)