Bermuda, your data, Google's gonna take your US data Google is building a new subsea cable, due to come online in 2026, that will connect South Carolina to Portugal with a layover in Bermuda. The search giant says the cable, dubbed Nuvem — the Portuguese word for cloud — will add capacity, reduce latency, and improve the strength and route diversity of its transatlantic network …
This seems to be the real limiting factor.
I can see the pulses going along quite well as each bronto (using the familiar) bites the next ones tail. But do they need to reverse direction to make it full duplex? Can the force of the bite convey additional non-binary data? Inquisitive minds, and all that rot....
There might be a few agencies' "special collection apparatuses" piggybacked there, as well.
After all, if I were an evil overlord, that's what I'd do. I might establish a coalition, naturally called EEE (Evil Entities' Extractors), Inc., whose members would fund the equipment, and its installation and maintenance. In return, they'd get a copy of the take. More-advanced equipment might allow the injection of messages, ala Go Go Gophers episode #8, "Tapping the Telegraph".
Bermuda being a British overseas territory does have some interesting potentials…
Having very good links could help make it an offshore data haven. (See Bruce Sterling Islands in the Net).
Obviously, we can expect both US and UK agencies to avail themselves of the opportunities this presents, along with their partners (Israel springs to mind for some reason…).
We can expect others to also avail themselves of the opportunities of being neither in the US or the UK to play with data…
Speaking as someone who lives in Bermuda and works in IT, Bermuda is not the prime location for such things.
1) It is literally the most expensive place in the world to live in the world.
2) Electricity costs can run to $0.40 a KW/h.
3) The island is tax free, but has a 25% duty on pretty much everything you import. A bag of groceries can cost $100.
4) The island economy is between 4 - 7 billion in debt.
5) The current government is doing nothing publicly to reduce the debt. They are just paying interest and hoping for the best.
6) The land mass is 23 square miles with 55,000 population with little space for any datacenters of scale.
7) Water is collected from rain, on roof top collectors and is expensive to buy.
8) Four to six hurricanes a year threaten the island.
9) The government just suffered a serious data breach and turned off all their servers and telephony for the last week. Confidence in their IT abilities and Security oversight is at an all time low.
https://www.royalgazette.com/crime/news/article/20230926/burt-declines-to-say-if-personal-data-breached-by-cyberattack/
It's surely important to remember that brontosauruses (brontosauri?) are thin and one end, fat in the middle, and thin again at the other [(c)Monty Python]
Perhaps the fat bit could be used for temporary buffering, or to provide alternate routes for two-way messages to pass each other.
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