We run the infrastructure that powers the internet

While collision avoidance alerts have become an  almost weekly occurrence at ESA mission control, the world’s largest satellite operator,  the SpaceX-owned Starlink, reported more than 49,000 risk mitigation manoeuvres in  the six months to the end of May 2024. Its fleet has grown to a total of  almost 7,000 craft in orbit.

The technique selected for multiplexing was packetswitching. Au alternative such as circuit switching couldhave been considered, but the applications beingsupported, such as remote login, were naturally served bythe packet switching paradigm, and the networks whichwere to be integrated together in this project were packetswitching networks. So packet switching was acceptedas a fundamental component of the Internet architecture.

his environment of uncontrolled information is not all bliss, however. Some critics point out that the same giant media companies that dominated the older forms of media produce much of the content available on the internet.

But that is changing.

Netheads vs Bellheads

to show how the design changes depending on the depth. The nearer to the surface you get, the more protection—armour—you need to withstand potential disturbances from shipping.

Have you ever thought about how that cat picture actually gets from a server in Oregon to your PC in London? We’re not simply talking about the wonders of TCP/IP or pervasive Wi-Fi hotspots, though those are vitally important as well. No, we’re talking about the big infrastructure: the huge submarine cables, the vast landing sites and data centres with their massively redundant power systems, and the elephantine, labyrinthine last-mile networks that actually hook billions of us to the Internet.

Today the move to cloud computing is replicating some of that early rhetoric—except, of course, that companies now reject any analogy with utilities, since that might open up the possibility of a publicly run, publicly controlled infrastructure.