The reference news network reported on July 23 that the US Consumer News and Business Channel website published an article on July 16 th, "The next front of the US-China science and technology war? Submarine cables that drive the global Internet. The article is excerpted as follows:
With the intensification of scientific and technological tension between the United States and China, the huge submarine cable network is becoming a new source of international tension.
Earlier this year, the Houthi armed forces in Yemen attacked ships of Israel, the United States and Britain, causing four of the 15 important submarine cables in the Red Sea to be cut off. The incident made headlines and the public's understanding of submarine cables increased.
It is predicted that the number of submarine cables in the world will increase in the next few years, which reflects the increasing demand for data traffic caused by the popularity of video streaming media and cloud services. Submarine cable is the backbone of the global Internet, carrying 99% of the global intercontinental data traffic.
Andy champagne, chief technology officer of Akamai Lab, said: "If you chat with people on another continent by email, text message or video, you use submarine cables-you probably don't think much."
Joe Vacaro, vice president and general manager of Internet monitoring company "Thousand Eyes", said that the key to the importance of submarine cables lies in their impact when they are destroyed. He said: "individuals like you and me, we won't say that the submarine cable was cut." We will find that the application we are trying to access suddenly becomes very slow or unavailable. "
Submarine cables are traditionally owned and operated by telecom operators. Recently, American technology giants including metauniverse, Google, Microsoft and Amazon have invested a lot of money to lay their own cables.
In May, The Wall Street Journal quoted an anonymous source in the State Council as saying that American officials privately warned technology companies including Google and metauniverse that submarine cables in the Pacific region might be vulnerable to China's so-called "surveillance".
It is reported that many international submarine cable projects are bypassing China due to concerns about data security and Beijing's expanding geopolitical influence. China has invested hundreds of millions of dollars to build its own underwater cable infrastructure in order to compete with American facilities.
At present, a key problem of submarine cable laying mode is that connecting submarine cables around the world will affect a large number of Internet infrastructures.
"If being able to provide a connection between two points in the world is critical to your business, then you must realize that cutting a cable at this location may have a huge impact on all major cloud providers," Vacaro said.
When these critical connections are interrupted, a "blame game" will follow, and consumers will often blame the services they are using in the case of interruption or traffic congestion.
Champagne said: "For submarine cables, the key point to remember is that they have specific requirements at the place where they transition from the seabed to the land ... and the number of geographical locations that meet these requirements is limited."
He also said: "As a result of these restrictions, the loss of a submarine cable may have a domino effect on the land-based network that depends on it. The impact of submarine cable interruption is usually far greater than the loss of land-based cables. " (Compile/Wang Haiyun)