I forget who said it, but there's a quote about how _of course_ we know more about space than the bottom of the ocean - in space we only have to deal with one atmosphere.

I (briefly) worked as a test engineer on a similar kind of contract. To meet the UX requirements for the system we were building, it had to be reliably operable in sea state 7+. The customer wanted touch screen interfaces. I exited that project when they were looking for volunteers to go spend time offshore in the Gulf of Alaska in bad weather, because that was the test environment they could find that met the requirements. Insanity.

I think people conflate decentralization with redundancy or resilience. IMO it just means you have multiple points of failure instead of one.

I think the issue is that centralization is more economical due to scale, but that assumes all else (geopolitics or other black swan events) don't impact things.

We saw a similar thing with supply chains and chip suppliers.

> reading articles like this does underscore how vulnerable global traffic is.

Then also remember that the internet haven't seen a global outage since forever, worst parts have been when some submarine cables break and traffic has to route around it, but never has the entire thing fully went down. Considering how most of it is built with bandaids, silver-tape and WD40, it's surprising it is as resilient as it is.

Everyone in the industry I can find including people who do recycling of submarine cables. It seems that cross sections are sometimes given away as gifts as part of a project but are really hard to find.

who have you asked?

Starshield (military arm of SpaceX/Starlink) does this for satellite imaging.

Normally in imaging, you first need to get the satellite over the location you want to image, at the right time - then let it orbit over a downlink location.

There are companies making a lot of money by having downlink capability in useful places (eg: near the poles) - combined with a fat pipe to the Internet.

With Starshield, the satellites talk to each other over laser - so the satellite doesn't have to wait to travel to a downlink location - just relay to of that is already there.

So for certain special cases it can help - but I think you'll find a cable stuffed with multimodal fiber had vastly more bandwidth.

Someone else with more experience could chime in but I would put it at less practical due to latency (sats are very high up), bandwidth (one laser vs a bundle of 1000s of fiber optic cables), cost (to overcome latency you need a closer orbit which requires more sats), single point of failure, lifespan, intercepted communications, solar flares… and that’s just off the top of my head.

A submarine cable is a bundle of hundreds of strands, so you need quite a few satellites to replace one cable.