We're all conntected - By a 3inch wire at the bottom of the ocean

I always thought that most of the bits and bytes flying around the world would be transmitted through satellites, but I'm sadly mistaken.

The vast majority of the worlds communication is carried by cables in the ocean. The first cable was the TAT-1, which connected North America with Europe in 1958 with a capacity of 640000 bytes per second. Until today, that bandwidth grew to an amazing 7.1 terabytes per second. One terabyte is 1 099 511 627 776 bytes. So..a lot!

Interestingly enough, there are incidents where ships or landslides under the ocean cut one of the cables. In 2006, a landslide disabled Internet access in Taiwan for weeks. Now THAT would be a big problem for me.