Also,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42191394 ("Yi Peng 3 crossed both cables C-Lion 1 and BSC at times matching when they broke (bsky.app)", 756 comments)

I'll add, Dr. Sal Mercagliano has an excellent YouTube channel that covers shipping (a topic he's a qualified expert in) and he has a video discussing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJmqCKtJnxM

The bottom line is that the alleged incident occurred in deep water, making an accidental, unnoticed anchor runnout *very* unlikely. He describes it as "A coincidence, and a very strange one," that this one vessel was seemingly over both cables just at the time they were severed, and gives a visual of maritime tracking to illustrate this.

No, even with Starlink lowering the latency to an acceptable level, there's no way to get anywhere near the total bandwidth of these cables with a satellite constellation, there's limits to how much you can transmit through the air (the biggest issue being there's limits to how tightly you can form beams from your satellite to a station on the ground, and those are quite large, so you ultimately can only get a certain bandwidth per square kilometer).

(This, BTW, is why Starlink isn't and will never be a true competitor to traditional ISPs in all but the most sparsely populated areas: they simply cannot support enough users to make a dent in most places)

You have to develop subspace (i.e. faster-than-light) communications for this to work. The distance between two points in Europe, after bouncing off a satellite in geostationary orbit, is very, very far, and EM waves can only travel at lightspeed, resulting in very long latency. It's significantly faster if your satellite is in low-earth orbit, but you can't keep a satellite in a fixed position there, so now you need a whole swarm of them so you have sufficient coverage at any time, and you need a way of periodically boosting their orbits or replacing them as they fall into the atmosphere.

There's a very good reason the world likes submarine cables for internet communications.

No, we won't. It would be easier and cheaper to replace them with microwave links or something like that. Satellites are always more expensive, limited in power, harder to fix, and unlikely to ever match the capacity of underwater cables.

Redundancy doesn't hurt.

The result of the cable cut was essentially meaningless. I doubt there was intent to cut these specific cables.

https://labs.ripe.net/author/emileaben/does-the-internet-rou...

What kind of ambiguity? A ship with a Russian crew, registered in China.