Tech blogger Kim Komando posted the following about the WWW. I found it to be quite interesting.
Hope you do, too...Jim H
I was at a BBQ last month, standing around with a group of people, and somehow we landed on this exact topic. I explained it. Jaws dropped. Nobody at that table had any idea how the internet actually reaches them. By the end you will, and you'll be the one dropping it at your next dinner.
So here goes. This email exists because of a hose at the bottom of the ocean. Not "the cloud." Not satellites beaming your Netflix down from space. The internet is more than 600 cables lying on the ocean floor, stretching over 900,000 miles, carrying nearly every email and stock trade on Earth. Really.
Near shore, cables are armored and buried. In the deep, each cable is about the width of a garden hose. Inside, the fibers are as thin as a human hair.
That hair carries your bank. Roughly $10 trillion in transactions crosses these cables every day. Your paycheck has been to the bottom of the Atlantic more times than Jacques Cousteau.
⚓ Anchors Away
About 200 cable faults happen per year, and boats and anchors cause two-thirds. In late 2024, a cargo ship’s anchor dragged the seabed over 100 miles, cutting two Baltic cables. That’s not an oopsie. That’s a plow.
When a cable breaks, a ship drags up the ends, crews splice them by hand and lower the cable back down in the ocean. The whole planet has about 60 cable ships, less than 20 for repairs.
The internet running your bank and before-bed FaceTime is maintained by a crew smaller than some school districts.
🛰️ Doesn’t Starlink fix this?
Fair question. Short answer: Nope.
More than 10,000 Starlink satellites are up there. When a cable gets cut, they’re a real lifeline. They kept Ukraine online when the wires got bombed.
But a lifeline isn't the main line. Add up every satellite from every company and you get about 50 terabits of data per second. The cables move around 8,750. Do the math and the entire satellite network, every company combined, carries less than 1% of what the cables do. Not the backup. The rounding error.
Here’s the kicker: Even satellites don’t escape the hoses. Those signals have to land somewhere, and the ground stations plug into fiber. The same fiber. Space handles the last few miles. The ocean does the heavy lifting.
It’s downright miraculous that it all runs on a hair inside a hose at the bottom of the sea. World Wide Web? Friend, it’s the World Wide Wet.