Tonga Volcano Highlights Global Undersea Cable Network Fragility
https://www.networkcomputing.com/networking/tonga-volcano-highlights-global-undersea-cable-network-fragility
Roughly 95 percent of intercontinental global data traffic travels over undersea cables that run across the ocean floor. Undersea cables are preferred for many reasons. Most importantly, they provide virtually unlimited bandwidth and very low latency compared to satellite communications.
The weekend’s volcano points to an issue that experts have been concerned about for years.
The global undersea cable network is very fragile and can go offline quickly. It is subject to disruptions from accidental cuts, malicious damage, and damage caused by natural disasters like hurricanes, tsunamis, and other incidents.
Undersea volcanos are just one more potential source of outages. How likely is something like this to happen again? While not an exact match, there is quite a bit of overlap when you overlay a submarine cable map and a map of the Pacific Ocean “ring of fire,” which is a region around much of the rim of the Pacific Ocean where many volcanic eruptions and earthquakes occur. The Tonga volcano is part of the Pacific Ring of Fire.
Unfortunately, certain regions of the world, including the Hawaiian Islands, the Suez Canal, Guam, and the Sunda Strait in Indonesia, are major points where many cables converge AND locations where natural disasters occur.