We don't need to tell you that we like to keep up with the latest telecoms happenings.
Below are five new articles we've been reading on our end, spanning from the state of the undersea cable market, to major mergers, to insight on that distributed denial of service attack last month. Dig in.
What Would Happen if Google Experienced a Major Outage?
Why it’s worth your time: Ashish Kedia, web solutions engineer at Google, earnestly tackles this very big question: what would happen if Google went down for an extended period of time?
How would productivity and profits be impacted? What would social media look like? Who would be the winners and losers? Would the sky fall down and the rivers run dry?
Undersea cables span the globe to send more data than satellites
Why it’s worth your time: Word on the street is that undersea cables are thriving. Our own Alan Mauldin spoke with the Financial Times about growth in the sector and the fast-rising requirements of cloud-based technology businesses and their customers.
What’s Happening With CenturyLink and Level 3? How Will These Operations Overlap?
Why it’s worth your time: Okay, a little bit of shameless self promotion here. The recent CentryLink and Level 3 news was big - and you can bet our team was all over it.
This quick explainer walks through exactly what happened and what we know so far.
The internet apocalypse map hides the major vulnerability that created it
Why it’s worth your time: Remember the recent Dyn distributed denial of service attack? Remember those maps with big red outage areas highlighted?
So, about that. As this article from The Verge points out, those maps don't necessarily show where infrastructure lives:
These maps seem to exist mostly to signal that the companies in question have lots of cool data and that it can be made into a flashy map — which might impress potential customers, but that doesn’t offer a ton of insights for the layperson.
But if we dig a little deeper, we can learn more about where internet outages actually start.
Tales In Tech History: Skype And How It Changed Worldwide Communications
Why it’s worth your time: Did you know that Skype actually stands for "sky peer to peer?" Or that the application was born from the peer-to-peer music sharing service Kazaa? I didn't - until I got a solid history lesson from this piece.
