The Internet is a staple in most people’s lives today. Whether you want to learn about science, stay in touch with friends, stream a movie, or just watch funny cat videos, all of the world’s information is available at your fingertips. The fact that it is so readily accessible makes it easy to forget just how amazing the technology is.

Depending on where you are and what information you are accessing, the data that gets delivered to your phone, computer, or other smart device likely came from a variety of different places around the world. This data travels largely through fiber optic cables.

If all the data is close to you, it will only travel through the local cables in your area, but that is often not the case. This is why there are fiber optic cables that run across the ocean floor, connecting each of the continents to the others (except Antarctica).

With endless miles of cables running across the oceans, it is not surprising that about 100-150 of them are damaged or completely severed each year. This can be done intentionally by terrorists, accidentally by boat anchors, or naturally through things like earthquakes or other events.

The technology behind the internet is designed to be very resilient, so when one cable is cut, the traffic will usually automatically reroute itself through a different path. Once the damaged cable has been fixed, traffic will start using it again, returning things to normal.

If too many cables get damaged, however, it could cause massive outages or slowdowns to the global internet, which would be devastating. This is an especially large risk for some countries that rely on a limited number of cables. Nicolo Boschetti is a doctoral student at Cornell University and he is part of a team working on a project that is being funded by NATO to attempt to minimize the impact of having cables cut. He explains the importance in a statement to the IEEE Spectrum:

“Think about Iceland. Iceland has a lot of financial services, a lot of cloud computing, and it is connected to Europe and North America by four cables. If those four cables get destroyed or compromised, Iceland is completely isolated from the world,”

This project aims to create a system that uses satellite technology for internet traffic rather than relying just on the undersea cables. Starlink is an example of this. It was developed by SpaceX, and is already up and running providing reliable internet to millions of people, and especially to people and places where it is difficult or impossible to get traditional services.

While this is a great first step, the NATO project is important because something as essential as the Internet should not rely on a single company.

Their project has been named the Hybrid Space/Submarine Architecture Ensuring Infosec of Telecommunications (HEIST) Consortium. Its goal is to create a less-penetrable internet architecture that uses both the existing undersea cables and satellite technology.

This is a major undertaking, but the redundancy that it could provide, especially to countries that are vulnerable in today’s environment, would be invaluable.

Greg Falco is an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell and recently told the Cornell Chronicle:

“We are assembling pieces of the puzzle and trying to create this massive new ecosystem. I’d say this is 100% a systems engineering problem, meaning that none of the tech that we’re going to build or assemble hasn’t already in some form been conceived in other applications. This is about fitting all the pieces together. From an engineering perspective, it’s hard, but then also you have the regulatory and political and economic nature of this, which is also hard,”

The HEIST team hopes to start having testing elements up and running this year, with a production system rolling out within the next two years. Beyond that, it would take significant upgrades and advancements to expand it to provide true redundancy for the global internet.

This sounds like a very worthwhile project.

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