Current implementations break from simple vibrations such as a bus driving down the road and shaking the ducts the fibre is in. Lots of work required still. Crazy expensive and crazy fragile.
Jumping on this bandwagon - these days I'm working in the submarine telco cable industry.
Considering a cable from singapore <> LA direct can run up $1.4bn USD. I think author needs a lot more research.
1. route planning takes a long time, the ocean floor moves (see: Fault Lines, Underwater Volcanos, pesky fisherman)
2. The ships do move _ a lot_ even with fancy station keeping and stabilisation.
3. cables get broken - a lot. Even now there's 10-15 faults globally on submarine cables. There are companies (See: Optic Marine) who operate fleets of vessels to lay and maintain cables. I'm sure the HVDC industry has the same.
Cool idea, I have been pondering it a lot myself, I figured maybe a ground return HVDC cable might be better for inter-country power grid links.
I know Sun Cable out of Australia want to build a subsea powercable to sell energy into ASEAN.
Backbone operator who was effected by this. We had a large number of routers in production with this bug, we were aware and upgrading as fast as we could, but with 99.999% uptime SLA's we only have so many minutes per router we could afford for downtime/outages. We had schedules in place (approx 3 months of out-of-hours upgrades) 1 week warning was a bullshit move. Dropping the BGP sessions on 1000's of routers globally was stupidity.
Bearing in mind we also couldn't just "apt-get upgrade" in place, most boxes required hard reboots to apply the patches.
The answer to your question is no, as per a few others have said, Don't violate Rule #1. We see bad actors very often, our job is to keep the bits flowing and the internet online.
Keeping the internet online is painful enough as it is without "researchers" dropping thousands of routers to "prove a point."
a single cable system under construction(which we are buying part of) (there are over 30) has over 120t of capacity @400G waves, but we are already discussing doing 800G waves, which will double that. We currently operate on over 7 submarine cables, one of the landing stations we operate out of has over 10 cable landing which is over 850T of capacity across all cables.
Most of my metro DF backhaul can push 16-19T down a single pair, and most of my builds are 1728 core fiber.
Starlink is very cool, it will connect ALOT of under served or simply not served people across the world, but the notion that it will even have the slightest chance at dinting the Subsea cable market is laughable.
I wonder if they will have cluster support, i have a few old fat servers with a few RTX spec GPU's laying around, my own fast ChatGPT running in the garage would be cool.