alt Hacker News- The UK is an island nation
- In event of all undersea cables being cut (which is a serious threat from Russia), satellite internet is your only option to have traffic leave the UK
- Unfortunately most major banks in the UK have very fragile infra that relies on foreign cloud hosts e.g AWS or Azure, which could well fall over in unexpected ways if the UK was cut off from the world
To be clear I disagree with Wes Streeting on a lot of this but the UK is in a uniquely precarious spot when it comes to how much is reliant on internet access.
Replies
Melatonic • today at 7:40 PM
Pretty sure there's no way current satellites can even get close to the bandwidth of satellite links.
Also isn't GPS always wireless ?
Those cloud hosts like AWS have infrastructure in the UK and a UK bank's data should already be there for performance reasons (see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/global-infrastructure/latest/reg...).
I can't promise that amazon has taken into account the possibility of not being able to phone home to the US, but I would hope an undersea cable cut is something they'd have already given serious consideration to. Cuts do happen every so often. Scandinavia in particular has seen several disruptions because of cable cuts.
Either way, it's a bit of leap to go from "We need to jam other countries satellites to protect your banking app" to "but what if the UK lost every satellite, and every undersea cable was cut, and all the local data centers and internet infrastructure in the UK stopped working!"