My favourite part of more technical deliverables is the opportunity to gain deeper insights into something I probably hadn’t spent much time thinking about.
Recently, I tackled a document about subsea cables, which, ok, may not sound interesting at first glance, but bear with me for a moment, ok?
At this point (and for better or worse) many of us spend the majority of our lives online, but we rarely think about what the internet is or how it works… unless, that is, it stops working. Thankfully, those outages are few and far between (for now, anyway), but it wasn’t until I was working on a recent document for a client that I realised how the conversations about connectivity that follow them usually focus on cloud computing without mentioning what connects us to the cloud in the first place.
Especially those of us who have to reach across oceans to send and receive our data.
That’s where subsea cables come in.
In order for these words to find their way to my website, they have to leave my laptop and—thanks to my internet service provider—journey to a landing station on the coast, where they’ll slip into cables that will carry them across the sea, making a number of stops along the way, until they reach the shores of my hosting provider. For me to see them appear on my site, they have to journey all the way back.
That they can make the round trip in mere seconds is down to the advanced technology wrapped in more than a kilometre of subsea fibre connecting the world in ways we never consider.
What I learned while working on that document was that the current generation of cables are so advanced that they’re upgradeable for decades depending on the equipment they’re connected to on land. Given how important these cables are to keeping the world connected, what happens when they break, and how much data we’re sending back and forth across the globe each day, that’s great news.
Not bad for technology dating back to the 1850s, huh?
Thanks for reading!
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