How the Internet Travels Across Oceans
I've rented some of these lines as part of a financial trading infrastructure.<p>What's immediately obvious is the line is much faster than going over the public internet, and there's no jitter: every time you ping it comes back in the same amount of time, whereas the internet pings will vary by several ms.<p>You also become acutely aware of cable breaks. Somehow this happens quite often under the English Channel. The network operator will start sending you emails that say<p>- Cable break detected<p>- Loading ship (can take ages)<p>- Found the break<p>- Patched it<p>- Back up<p>Occasionally bad weather would delay it.