Extra Credit Blog

For my extra credit blog I decided to use the article A Giant Undersea Cable Makes the Internet a Split-second Faster. This article was written by David Goldman on March 30, 2012. I picked this article because the title quickly grabbed my attention and I really wanted to learn more on this new discovery. The reason why people can connect to each other’s websites and Skype with one another from every corner of the world is that every continent is actually connected together. With a grouping of cables no larger than one’s home broadband connection, stretch around the bottom of the sea to link together all around the globe. What I find most interesting is that I did not know about this earlier. This is so fascinating and shows that our world is moving in a direction of faster and more efficient energy and technology. There are three companies that are in the course of developing cable networks that will connect London to Tokyo through the polar ice cap. The cables have 10 gigabit-per-second speeds which is 2,000 times faster than your home internet connection. My only question about this is that are we depending all of our internet access on these underwater cables? What if something happens and it gets disconnected, will we all lose power to the internet? According to the article an incident just happened which affected the web. A ship, a little over a month ago, cut services for a large amount of the country when it dropped an anchor on the coast of Kenya. A sudden drop in availability in services in Kenya was noticed by Google. The cables are read on GPS devices which help ships know what spaces to avoid in the ocean when they are out on sea so they do not damage these cords. Also there are outsourced companies that are ready at any time to repair damages that may happen. Having these multiple connecting cables to continents from different locations will let the internet not be disrupted if it is snapped. So if one cable does snap you will still be able to Skype with a friend from around the world.