April  2024 | Here's what's happened in the last month.

If the last two months have reminded us of anything, its how much the Internet is dependent on submarine cables.

Multiple Autonomous Systems (ASes) often share a single cable, each with numerous IP links on the cable. Consequently, when a cable fails, all IP links relying on that cable are affected.

Last year, one of our inagural Pulse Fellows sought to understand how the failures of submarine cables affect end-to-end Internet connectivity. To do so, his team at the University of California, Irvine, developed Nautilus, a cross-layer cartography framework designed to map IP links to their corresponding submarine cables.

Using Nautilus, the team generated a comprehensive submarine cross-layer map using more than 235 million traceroutes collected by RIPE Atlas and CAIDA over 15 days in March 2022. These traceroutes yielded 8.9 million valid IP links (including IPv4 and IPv6), of which 80% were mapped to submarine cables.

As per the figure above, nearly half of these were mapped to two or more cables, meaning they have a higher resilience than those links that rely only on one cable.

By providing a clearer picture of the relationships between these network layers, Nautilus lays the foundation for a more thorough analysis of the Internet’s resilience to submarine cable disruptions, including rapid impact assessment and proactive strategies during cable failures, such as those that are ongoing in the Red Sea and off the coast of West Africa.

• Bangladesh Coping With Submarine Cable Outage Thanks to Indian Terrestrial Cables, Local Content Caches
• Huge Growth in Networks Benefiting From Routing Security
• Nautilus: Cross-Layer Cartography of the Undersea Internet Backbone
• Charting The Internet’s Dependence on Internet Exchange Points
• Reverse Traceroutes Help Troubleshoot, Improve Visibility of Internet’s Health
• Announcing 2024 Pulse Research Fellows
• Limited Internet Outage in Taiwan Highlights the Importance of Resilient Internet Infrastructure
• Tracking Internet Shutdowns in 2024, Q1

Have a story or research to share? Email us pulse@isoc.org

• Pakistan, 21—22 April: Authorities orederd for mobile services to be suspended ahead of by-elections in Punjab and Balochistan provinces.
• India, 6—7 April: Authorities ordered for mobile services to be suspended in the Ladakh district ahead of planned protests.
• Sudan, 2 Feb— Ongoing: Ongoing conflict continue to hamper Internet services.
• Guinea, 24 Nov—Ongoing: Social media and video streaming services continue to be afected by ongoing service blocking actions.
• Palestine, 7 Oct—Ongoing: Internet services continue to be hampered by ongoing conflict and power outages.
• India, 26 Sep—Ongoing: Internet connectivity remains to be fully restored in all regions of Manipur.
• Ethiopia, 6 Aug—Ongoing: Internet connectivity and access to social media and messaging apps continues to be affected in the Amhara region.

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