Giving a whole new meaning to wireless

Our dependence on reliable internet service is made fairly stark by recent events: A ship tries to anchor off Egypt in a storm last Wednesday, fouls its anchor and in the process cuts an undersea fibre optic cable and reduces internet capability for 75 million people in the middle east and the Indian sub-continent by as much as 70 per cent.

For every publisher out there who is thinking about outsourcing business and publishing functions halfway round the world, this is probably cause for pause. Apparently, not many of us realize how much internet traffic goes for a large part of its journey through such cables, or how vulnerable they are. The Guardian published a comprehensive summary of the events and outcomes.

Everything old is new again. According to The English Channel by Nigel Calder (1986) the first submarine cable across the English channel was completed on August 28, 1850 and that night was destroyed by a French fisherman.

The engineers had exchanged the first cross-Channel messages and gone contentedly to bed when the fisherman found he had great difficulty in hauling up his anchor. It was fouled on what he took to be an unfamiliar form of seaweed. Not realizing it was copper wire, coated in latex, he cut off a length of it as proof of his botanical discovery, and when the engineers woke up next morning, they could not communicate.