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Abigail Dougherty
The cable ship Responder has docked in Auckland after reaching its halfway mark on laying fibre-optic cabling on the sea bed. (Video first published in January 2018)
A bit like a spider web attached to a tree, New Zealand’s internet network hangs off just 20 strands of glass fibre, each about the thickness of a human hair. Tom Pullar-Strecker explains. You read that right. Those glass fibres, contained in four submarine cables connecting New Zealand to the United States and Australia, carry virtually all communications to and from the country. Cut them all, and InternetNZ chief security officer Sam Sargeant says most of the modern technology systems we rely on for work and play would stop working.