I'm getting tired of ISP's blaming the trans-pacific cable anytime there is an outage / slowdown

There was a time when I suppose I could have believed this but the story of "sharks attacking the trans-Pacific cable" have been going on for a bit too long now and since it is such a difficult / impossible thing for anyone to prove / disprove, I tend to not believe it.

There was a time that I didn't really even believe the cable existed and I have some doubts about whether or not it actually does. It just seems a bit odd to me that a several thousand mile long extension cord goes all the way across the pacific ocean.

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Let's just go ahead and not go full conspiracy theorist and presume that they do exist and have for quite some time. This would cost an astronomical amount of money and if that truly is the backbone of all communication between the East and West you would think that there would be some sort of backup plan should something go wrong. I am reminded about how when playing SimCity it was a very bad idea to attach all of your electrical grid at one location. Just one of the buildings starts on fire an a whole part of your city is f**ked.

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_{I suppose you would need to be around my age to get this}

There would be several contingency plans is what I am trying to say and I feel that local internet service providers will default to blaming the mysterious undersea cables in order to just get customers off their backs about slow internet.

This has been the case here in my condo in Da Nang for a few days now and it is really frustrating to see Netflix buffering and when it does play I'm watching something in 280p or something like that. While I have not complained directly, a lot of the people in my building work online so they have complained and the owner sent out a group message blaming sharks attacking undersea cables. I guess I just don't buy that but from an ISP ownership standpoint this is a wonderful "out" for them to have anytime something goes wrong.

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There's like one very blurry video of a shark attacking what we are told is the undersea internet cable and they will always reference this when they are making excuses about how all of a sudden the internet is slow city wide.

We did kind of call them out on this not that long ago because there are more than one ISP in this country. The one that is most used blamed the sharks again, but people using one of their competitors didn't have this issue. I have a hard time believing that these various ISP's all use different undersea cables but maybe someone out there knows differently.

To me it just seems like a really convenient "out" anytime that anything is going wrong with what is bound to be a tremendous amount of infrastructure that is involved in getting and keeping everyone online.

Another example in my own life has to do with another "shark attack" and a friend of mine figured he would try to switch over to mobile data because what he was doing absolutely had to be done that day online. When he switched over to mobile data on his phone the drop in speed completely disappeared. How do we explain that? Are we supposed to believe that all mobile data has NOTHING to do with these frequently-attacked-by-ocean-life cables?

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Of course this could all boil down to my own ignorance about how the internet actually works. I stopped keeping up with that sort of thing back in the late 90's.

The excuse just comes up too frequently for me to really believe it anymore and if the past 5 years have really taught me anything it would be to seriously doubt any official release that attempts to explain a problem.

If you have real information about how all of this works I would love to read about it but all I can find online is normally written by people that have some stake in the game so of course they would print that.