Submarine communication cables are the carriers of nearly 100 percent of all the mails, tweets, pasta recipes and other digital communications across the oceans. They connect every continent except Antarctica. They are also:

An achievement: Five attempts to lay a transatlantic cable were made over nine years—in 1857; two in 1858, 1865, and 1866—before lasting connections were finally achieved. The first official message to pass between two continents was a congratulatory note from the Queen to the President on August 16, 1858. The cable was destroyed the following month when Wildman Whitehouse applied excessive voltage to it while trying to attain faster telegraph operation. The Atlantic didn’t get broadband until 1988, when fiber-optic cable was laid across it.

Chewy: Deep-ocean cables can be 17-20 mm (0.7-0.8 in), like a garden hose. At least 40 cable faults have been caused by shark and “fish bites”, verified by the presence of fish teeth.

Entangling: Between 1877 and 1960, at least 16 whale entanglements took place with undersea cables. Today, the most common problems are anchors and trawls getting caught in the cables.

Fast: On the 1858 cable and it took 2 minutes to transmit just one character (compared to ten days for a message by ship at the time). Today, each fiber pair within a cable can carry information (including video) equivalent to 150,000,000 simultaneous phone calls. In 2008, the world’s first transatlantic transmission at 40 gigabytes per second was made between Luleå, Sweden and Manhattan over the TAT-14 cable.

File sharing for navies: The US navy didn’t mind sharing some of the Soviet Union’s information during the Cold War by tapping into USSR copper cables. According to ZDnet, today’s fiber-optic cables did occasionally prove to carry too much data for the NSA’s budget.

As you might have noted from before, we are fascinated by these high-powered garden hoses. If you know of more cool facts, please don’t hesitate to add them in the comments below.

Sources: Wikipedia article about submarine communications cables, ISPC – About submarine communication cables, ZDnet – Spy agency taps into undersea cable, History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications from FTL Design. (A great resource with a huge amount of information.)

Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending approval of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We also talked about Nokia’s recent financial results, if Google Chrome can hit more than 50% market share this year, and the recent privacy-blunder by the guys behind the Path mobile app.

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There’s no denying that Google Chrome continues to be the darling of the web browser market. And as we predicted in July last year, Chrome overtook Firefox around November 2011.

So now the question is, when will Google also wrestle down Internet Explorer, and become the undisputed king of the browser world? In December 2011, Chrome 15 became the most popular browser in the world, beating Internet Explorer 8, but if you combine all IE versions, Microsoft still holds the number 1 spot.

Equipped with the latest web browser statistics from StatCounter, we set out to see when Chrome is likely to achieve more than 50% market share.

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Want to see how your favorite US sports site is doing, if it has a perfect 100% uptime score or not? If you want to check the latest scores and it isn’t working, could it be a problem with your computer or connection, or the site? We’ve got the solution for you!

For some time now we’ve been monitoring 34 major US sports and news sites related to sports. Our recent articles on the Super Bowl are a result of that monitoring.

Now you can look at how these sites are doing yourself on the public reports page for this list of US sports websites.

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Who has not used Google Maps? Raise your hand! Since the launch 7 years ago, Google Maps has become the de facto map service that users around the world go to for all their mapping needs.

As we say Happy Birthday to Google Maps, read on to find out some of the critical milestones in its history, and some amazing numbers and statistics.

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In 2010, there were just over 1 million secure Internet websites worldwide. Almost half of those, or 446,992 to be exact, were located in the United States.

But in which country can we find the most secure websites in relation to population? The answer may surprise you.

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