The Discovery Channel makes sharks look pretty terrifying every summer during "Shark Week." While getting attacked by a shark is definitely a big fear for many when they go to the beach, the threat of sharks making your Internet connection go down is apparently also very real.
Just when you thought it was safe to turn on your computer, Google has revealed that one of the reasons it reinforces its underwater fiber-optic cables with a "Kevlar-like" material is because sharks bite them, according to Dan Belcher, a product manager on the Google Cloud team in an opening keynote at a Google Cloud Roadshow event in Boston. Yes, apparently, cables look pretty tasty to sharks. Just look at a shark go to town on a thick undersea cable in this camera footage from 2010.
"All submarine equipment providers support a variety of cables with different degrees of hardening that depend on the cable depth, and protect against a number of external aggressors like ship anchors/trawlers/fishing, seabed corrosion, and yes, even sharks," a Google spokesperson told VICE's Motherboard blog in an email.
The fiber-optic cables carry Internet traffic around the world. The glass fibers are protected from movement or breakage with an outer layer, a protective layer and a plastic coating. The goal of the fibers is to deliver Internet speeds at 1 gigabit per second, which is 100 times faster than basic broadband.
Sharks' appetite for cables is apparently not a new phenomenon. The New York Times reported in 1987 that sharks were biting fiber-optic cables that would connect the United States, Europe and Japan. Apparently, a shark bite could cost $250,000 or more to repair, and we don't even want to think about how much it would cost to fix these days. The paper also noted that the first recorded instance of sharks being attracted to the cables was in 1985 off the Canary Islands.
The website oAfrica reported in 2009 that the electric fields emitted by the fiber-optic cables make sharks feel like there are fish nearby, so they attempt to eat the cables.
However, apparently, sharks biting through fiber-optic submarine cables is also something of an undersea myth. "A shark can bite something, but there are much greater problems under the sea for fiber-optic cables," said Tim Stronge, a cable expert at TeleGeography, a telecommunications research firm, in an interview with VICE's Motherboard blog.
Anchors, fishing boats and natural disasters are actually probably more likely to cause damage to fiber-optic cables under the sea, the article reported.
Google recently announced that it has joined five other companies in building a trans-Pacific cable system to connect the West Coast of the U.S. to Japan. The system, called Faster, is estimated to cost $300 million. With that amount of money being spent, you can't blame Google for wanting to protect these cables from whatever type of damage they can encounter under the sea.
