The first undersee telegraph cable was laid in 1850 between England and France, and then TAT-1, the first transatlantic telephone cable with repeaters was inaugurated in 1956. It took more than a century to develop an economically feasible technical solution for preserving the signal quality.
Nowadays 99% of the intercontinental communication traffic is carried over by submarine cable systems, including 95%-98% of the global Internet traffic. Taking into account that most datacenters are located in buildings, "the cloud" is about sets of terrestrial systems dependent on a multi-vendor undersee cable infrastructure.
Starting with 2008 portable modular datacenters have been offered by IBM, Google, and Sun (pods built into standard shipping containers), and in 2020 Microsoft announced a successful experiment with an underwater pod, but all those still depend on the undersee cables.
Google and Facebook are the biggest investors in undersee communication cables - it's estimated that they own about 29% of the intercontinental cables, followed by Amazon and Microsoft with significantly less percentages.
In 2019 AWS and IBM Cloud announced plans to deploy satellite-based connectivity, but there is a long way to go until that technology will be able to take off the pressure of the underwater network.
The quantum technology is in its early childhood, currently used in cryptography as an alternative to resolve the key exchange problem.
In an epoch dominated by economic and social challenges we can't take for granted that the underwater backbone of the high-speed Internet will stay untouched by bad guys, having alternatives is of key importance.
Going multi-cloud looks way better from strategic point of view, and on the job market there is already an increasing demand for network infrastructure and security specialists.
