Samanth Subramanian

Yeah.

I mean, that hasn't changed.

I mean, there's a couple of other things that haven't changed, but that definitely hasn't changed.

They call them a drum or they call it a spool, but essentially you wind the cable around the spool and then you load it on board and then you set off into the high seas.

So that part of it hasn't changed.

Of course, the cable is much lighter now, so you can load a lot more cable onto it because it's not sort of thick metal.

You can, definitely.

I mean, you can use satellites, and in fact, satellite phones have been around for a long while.

Garmin makes all of these satellite-enabled devices, and you can download weather data and other stuff onto it.

It's just that the volume, the sheer volume of data that we ingest on a daily basis...

you couldn't fill Earth's orbit with enough satellites to take all that data up.

I mean, think about what it means.

It means everybody's Netflix streams and everybody's Zoom calls and everybody's texts and phone calls and day trades and PowerPoint presentations that live on the cloud and data servers that serve other kinds of things.

Everything is essentially on a cloud somewhere.

And there's so much data out there that there's not enough satellites that could process all of it.

It definitely has.

I mean, in the 80s and 90s, and I mean the 1980s and 1990s, a lot of these telecom companies around the world were state-owned.

And so they would kind of figure out that they needed a cable to run from, let's say, London to Portugal to three African countries and then onwards to Singapore, as an example.

So the telecom companies in each of these governments would come together and they would say, well, look, this is how we want to lay the cable.

This is how much money we can put up.