The internet is a huge place, bigger than our tiny minds can
comprehend. Statistically, a human cannot surf the entire web content in even
30 million years of his life as new data is constantly being added. If this is
a surprise for you, imagine the deep web, which is 50 times larger than the one
we know.
Enough about the internet’s mind-blowing facts, but it is undoubtedly one of the most important inventions of a man in history. The flow of the internet is pretty typical, and it can only be transmitted via a handful of mediums. The most common are the wires, either coax or fiber optics. That’s a very effective way to transfer data over the internet from one place to another via a physical connection—microwave radiations used to transmit cellular data over the air. Then there is a third kind of network called the submarine network, which is an optical network that covers the internet spanning over the oceans, which is fascinating.
The internet speed of a single fiber cable of a submarine
network can transmit the data at 26.2 TERABYTES PER SECOND. To put this into
perspective, the first-ever data that was broadcast over the submarine network
took 17 hours to reach its destination due to the sheer distance of the ocean.
Now, it can travel in seconds, which is lightning fast.
The data we send and receive over the internet has probably
traversed through one of the hundreds of submarine networks. This makes us
wonder how much the technology has grown over the years without us even
realizing, and we may be living the futuristic world our ancestors thought a
hundred years ago. Make no mistake; this technology is not showing signs of
stopping or even slowing down but moving at a fast pace into the future. In the
context of the submarine network, it is still growing despite its immense power
and speed. The network speed of 26.2 TB per second was recorded last year at a
distance of 6600 kilometers (4128 miles) between Virginia Beach, Virginia, to
Bilbao, Spain.
There is an infographic put together by Infinera.com that
gives us a closer look at the myths and facts and other details about the
submarine network, aka the internet workhorse.
Infographic by: infinera.com
