Experts say internet reliant on vulnerable undersea fiber-optic cables | McClatchy Washington Bureau

Experts say internet reliant on vulnerable undersea fiber-optic cables | McClatchy Washington Bureau
"WASHINGTON-Hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable lay on the ocean floors, a crucial part of the global internet’s backbone, and only rarely do ship anchors, undersea landslides or saboteurs disrupt them.
...Undersea cables conduct nearly 97 percent of all global communications, and every day an estimated $10 trillion in financial transfers and vast amounts of data pass through the seabed routes. Satellites, once crucial but now limited in speed and bandwidth, handle only a tiny percentage of global communications.
...But in recent years, a few incidents have drawn attention to sabotage and espionage.
In October 2015, U.S. authorities scrambled to monitor Russian submarine patrols and a high-tech Russian surface ship, the Yantar, in a corridor of the North Atlantic that hosts a cluster of undersea cables.
The Yantar carried deep-sea submersibles and cable-cutting gear."