Reliable internet connection is an obvious important issue nowadays, whether for economic, geopolitical or cultural reasons. In a time when media industries are strongly relying on a platform service model based on streaming content, access to global cultural assets becomes strongly constrained by the infrastructure of connectivity. Still this day, due to historical traits of infrastructure development, providing connectivity to certain regions can be challenging, especially in the Global South, and companies in the tech sector have been struggling to stretch their operations to previously inaccessible locations. Google’s recently failed project Loon, for instance, sought to release helium balloons to the stratosphere in order to provide internet access to unconnected areas. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is now investing in project Taara, a similar attempt to relay internet signal to regions without previous internet infrastructure through light beams. SpaceX launched their Starlink satellites with the same purpose, whereas Meta also had a project to connect the unconnected via satellites and solar-powered drones.
Although often engulfed by scenic imageries of the sky’s vastness and dreams of widespread connectivity through the air, most of the internet and cloud computing actually depend on very terrane and even submarine infrastructure. This is also where most of the more grounded efforts to take networked computing to still unconnected locations or to enhance the already existing infrastructure take place. In order to transmit information securely and reliably, 98% of international internet traffic is carried through the vast underwater network of submarine cables. Undersea cables are normally owned by consortiums of owners, who are responsible for costs associated with laying and repairing undersea connections. Recently in 2021, GlobeNet provided a transatlantic cable connection, the EllaLink cable, stretching 6,000 km between Fortaleza (Ceará) and Sines (Portugal), offering advanced IT infrastructure and low-latency routes between European and South American companies and users. This is highly relevant for the Gaming industry, for instance, which has been trying to establish cloud gaming platforms and nurture a user base for streaming service models unsuccessfully for more than fifteen years now. It is promised that EllaLink will be able to provide a connection with 30-50% less latency for gamers playing across the Atlantic (50% for users in the Northeast region of Brazil in comparison to 30% in the Southeast, as the signal has to travel in milliseconds a distance of more than 2000 km). This is a significant step for the establishment of cloud gaming services, a model which has been struggling to provide solid services for more than a decade now. The connection is very promising as an expansion of European game services to a multitude of new users, but it can also be an opportunity on the other way around for Latin-American game developers and platforms in the digital economy. Furthermore, it also allows us to see how gaming and other digital activities are always already traversed by issues of political geography and national interests. For more than twenty years there were no practical direct data transfer routes between Europe and South America. Atlantis-2, the cable linking the two continents, was not used for data transfer due to its limited capacity. Issues of sovereignty were alleged when the project to build the EllaLink cable started, as the connection could potentially allow circumventing the NSA-based surveillance program PRISM through a cable route connecting Europe directly with South America. Back in 2014, then President of Brazil Dilma Rousseff said that the EllaLink connection would be central to "ensure the neutrality" of the Internet, with the possibility of denying access to Internet traffic in Brazil to national government activities of the US.
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AuthorThis blog is meant to provide a space for discussing the geophysical as well as the the imaginary entanglements between media infrastructures and organic environments. In the coming months, it will be dedicated to my current project, Cloud Gaming Atlas, which is particularly interested in observing and interrogating the infrastructures developed for cloud gaming initiatives in regard to their environmental implications. Additionally, it should also gather information about events and publications related to my project at the Zukunftskolleg and the Department of Literature, Art and Media of the University of Konstanz. Archives
January 2024
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