Internet's Deep Infrastructure Could Double As a Sensor Network For Earthquakes and More

citadrianne writes with an article at Motherboard that exposes an interesting under-use of the worldwide physical network that carries Internet traffic. Even though there are many thousands of miles of undersea cable (containing many times that length if you add up the various lengths of fiber), the physical body of the internet is remarkably un-useful when it comes to detecting things like seismic shifts. From the article: "Right now the current system of cables on the seafloor is deaf, dumb, and blind," said Rhett Butler, the director of the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology at the University of Hawaii. "Although they carry trillions of bits of information and basically run the global economy at this point, they don't know anything about the environment they're in. They don't measure anything at all and that seems crazy."

According to Butler, AT&T and other telecom companies have paid lip service to the idea of integrating sensors into the cables, but he has watched proposal after proposal for smarter cables fall through for a variety of reasons.... "[In] a certain sense mankind has given the nod to lay cables across the open sea floor without any restrictions, so it seems to me to be a little reasonable [for the telecom companies to have] a little obligation on their part to help people out."

Comments

Re:What kind of communism is this?

[Adriax]

There's a good reason not to make them smarter too.
Sensors could be used to detect military movements and possibly find small/stealth unit movements as well. So a sufficiently paranoid nation or group could decide to destroy those sensors.

No company would want to give north korea or isis a reason to actively target undersea cables.

What a fascist

[Anonymous Coward]

You let them lay cables, then demand that they "help people out" and "do their part", AFTER the cables are laid?

This is why people fail at capitalism. A deal is a deal. Want a better one, make a different deal. It's not "unfair" that later on you realize that you don't have something you only just thought of.

Do one thing well

[petes_PoV]

If you want an array of seismic sensors, build one. If you want an inter-continental data network, build that. Don't try to hack the one to do the job of the other.

Re:Do one thing well

[David_Hart]

If you want an array of seismic sensors, build one. If you want an inter-continental data network, build that. Don't try to hack the one to do the job of the other.

Exactly. The complication and the added failure modes would go up drastically if sensors were incorporated into communications lines. What happens if all of the sensors fail? Do you tear up the communications lines just to fix them?

What you do is build a separate system, build relationships with the communications companies, and make a business deal to have it laid at the same time as undersea cables. I agree that there are economic benefits to sharing the same deployment resources, but they should be separate infrastructures.

Not peanuts

[elgatozorbas]

From TFA:

In terms of rote economics, implementing these sensors into the cable system would be “peanuts” compared to what telecom consortiums are already paying to lay cables across oceans. According to the October ITU report, adding these sensors would add an additional 5-10 percent to the cost of laying a new cable, which generally cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

5-10 percent of hundreds of millions of dollars is not peanuts to me. While this may be an interesting idea, I can imagine that telecom operators are not enthusiastic to implement something this costly, which adds complexity to their installation with limited benefit for themselves.