Undersea cables are the backbone of the internet. Connecting places like the United States to Europe, or France to India, these submarine fiber optic cables permit the world’s web traffic to flow. One such cable is called Marea. It runs from Virginia Beach in the U.S. to Balboa, Spain. And recently, a company called Infinera announced that it had broken a record for how much data it could send through this cable in a second.

Article Link – Popular Science – A 10-million-pound undersea cable just set an internet speed record

Discussion Questions:

1. What in the article interested you the most? List three key takeaways from the article.
2. How much data can be sent through the Marea cable per second?
3. What methodologies and technologies did Infinera use when creating the Marea cable to accomplish this record?

Source: Rob Verger, Popular Science, “A 10-million pound undersea cable just set an internet speed record”, www.popularscience.com, March 5, 2019.