0.1 Seconds Under the Sea
Contents › Chapter 5 The Way Back
Back as light
The boxes cross the same sea in reverse, back to Busan
View in 3DBoxes crossing back
The boxes become light and set off in a line. They go back the way they came: from the data center by the river to the US coast, then into the cable on the floor of the Pacific. About 45 ms later, they reach the shore in Busan.
Why?Boxes from the same video usually travel the same way, so they stay mostly in order. If a path is jammed or broken, the route-finding machines send them another way.
Learn moreWith today’s cables, one pair of glass threads can carry hundreds of movies’ worth of data every second. One cable holds several pairs of these threads.
- Time
- 56 ms → 102 ms
Simplified route · light in glass at about 200,000 km per second
View this scene in 3D →Read more
Wikipedia: Submarine communications cable
More in the series
Times are simplified values, calculated from a simplified route (Busan → south of Japan → Pacific → Oregon, about 9,200 km) and the speed of light in glass (about 200,000 km per second). Real times vary with the carrier, the route and traffic.