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- cross-posted to:
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Summary
NATO has been warned of potential global internet blackouts amid a surge in suspected Russian sabotage of subsea fibre optic cables.
Telecom giants like Vodafone, Telefonica, and Orange urged UK, EU, and NATO officials to classify the undersea cable network as critical infrastructure.
Since October 2023, at least 11 cables have been damaged in the Baltic Sea, with over 50 Russian vessels spotted nearby. The UK is monitoring the Russian spy ship Yantar.
Officials also raised concerns about Chinese activity near Taiwan and called for increased surveillance and international cooperation.
This extortion and ad brought to you by Starlink and Elon Musk. It is what he talks about with Putin. It was never a real issue in the past. There is redundancy in the system. Cutting yourself off from communication assets is not very bright and hurts yourself as much as others in almost every case. The blind spot works both ways in the long term for an advantage that only lasts hours to days in limited strategic depth. So you take some asset in the dark. Now you need to defend that asset from the dark, or the newly created blind spot is now your vulnerability too. None of this makes much sense in the real world. What does make sense is an extortionist no one wants around trying to make everyone pay for his kingpin politics.
Starlink routes through ground-based infrastructure though. If you separated England, for example, from the world then starlink is also going to be either separated or badly impacted in England.
Where are you getting that from? If this were a real constraint, Ukrainian systems would be a joke, as would those on Starship, planes, boats, etc. The low orbital infrastructure is specifically to ensure high throughput. Some offloading is logical in some circumstances, but not as a constraint.
Mmm - seems there is some satellite->satellite routing in addition to the ground stations. It does degrade latency though.