Cable Tech

I'd like to ask you a simple question. How do you get internet? How do you access a webpage in Europe or Asia? Its all satellites right? I mean, we have about 40+ U.S. satellites in space hovering around and transmitting signals and such, right? Partially.

Today, I'm going to take a look at an intriguing way of connectivity that might make you re-think what it takes to display a web page or image in China or Iran. If you don't know by now, the backbone of internet connectivity is all done with wired connections. But how could you possibly have a connection from here to China or Europe? You would have to run a cable the length of the entire ocean! Absolutely.
That really sounds expensive if not impossible! Sure.
You would have to map the entire ocean floor and make a special cable and make it really really long! Yup.

Take a gander at this popular picture below aptly titled "The Internet's undersea world."

So what does this picture show? Well for one thing, it shows all the cables that currently run under our seas and oceans to keep us connected to the entire world. Think about that for a second. If you are on amazon.com and you order a book or something from the UK, that information travels from your computer through your router (if you have one) and to your internet company and then to the operator of the undersea cable which routes your data through one of the cables that runs all the way from the U.S. to the U.K. at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean and to the Amazon servers there. The return trip is about similar too. The best part is that all this happens in the blink of an eye.

Fiber optics works by transmitting light, which travels through a fiber optics cable like as if its going through a big tunnel. Imagine you took a crazy bounce ball and throw it into a tunnel. It will bounce off a bunch of surfaces as it travels through the tunnel. Thats the same way light travels through fiber optics cable. However, if you can decrease the size of the tunnel, the ball will bounce much more often and go through the tunnel faster. Same concept, except that in fiber optic cables, the "tunnel" is about 8-10 microns small which is about 0.00031 inches in diameter which essentially gives light a straight clear path of travel. From what I remember in my Science classes, light travels through a vacuum at 300,000 kilometers per second.

What does that mean? It means that data can make a two way trip from the U.S. to the U.K. and back in less than half a second.

Wrap your head around that little bit of knowledge and I bet the next time you go to a website, you will be thinking about how much the data had to travel to get to your computer. Nifty.