v3.10: The internet under the sea

This episode, we’re going back in time, to the days of the so-called ‘Victorian internet’ of telegraph cables and an ambitious plan to lay a transatlantic cable from the southwest of Ireland to eastern Canada, which has come to underpin the digital era as we know it.

You see, despite all our ‘wireless’ connectivity and ‘cloud’ computing, the internet we enjoy today relies on an extensive network of cables crossing seas and oceans. 🌊

Our island on the edge of Europe has had a crucial role to play in this global network, both in the past and present. And helping us with a history lesson in this episode is Deryck Fay, author of Connecting A Nation: The Story of Telecommunications in Ireland and all-round telecoms enthusiast.

Deryck and Elaine will actually both appear in the upcoming documentary, The Cable That Changed the World, which will cover this historic story in detail on RTÉ One, August 12th at 9.35pm – don’t miss it! 📺

And before we even get into the history with Deryck, we have a reminder of what it’s like to be disconnected, even briefly, in the modern world. Remember that CrowdStrike outage not long ago? Well imagine that could only be fixed by specialist ships travelling great distances to the site of the damage, because that’s what happens when one of our modern-day subsead cables gets cut. And that happens more often than you would like to think. ✂️

Just this year, there have been widespread, lengthy internet outages in Tonga, swathes of West and Central Africa, and parts of East Africa and South Asia, all because of damage to submarine cables. ⚓️

They have also been the focus of what Bloomberg calls “geopolitical trolling” off the coast of Ireland, as our critical position at the confluence of the internet’s infrastructure continues to this very day, albeit in a different guise.

This is why people like Luke Hardcastle, government and infrastructure director at EY Ireland, are calling for greater Irish investment in this international infrastructure, but there are also detractors to that development. Because the physical footprint of the internet is formed not just by cables but data centres too – and we’ve all heard about the issues the island is having with them. 🪫

But whatever the future holds for Ireland and the global internet, the historical significance of its role in connecting the world cannot be understated, which is why the Valentia Transatlantic Cable Foundation is campaigning for the landing site of that first cable to cross the Atlantic to become a UNESCO World Heritage site, as it’s a historic achievement we can be proud of. 🇮🇪

After this episode, we’re taking a break, so be sure to listen back to the entire series so far if you haven’t already, or sign up for the bonus content if you are missing us too much. And you can follow more from Deryck Fay at DFIT.ie.