Business Insider Australia has a somewhat informative picto-article (hat tip Naked Capitalism) about the state of the physical internet (i.e., cables and server farms). "Somewhat" because it (i) comes larded with journalistic asides designed to make the data more comforting and less technical, and (ii) goes out of its way to omit cell traffic from the equation. The phrases in bold below cover both scenarios:
...people often mistakenly assume that internet traffic happens by air – our mobile devices, after all, aren’t wired to anything.
But satellites carry less than 1% of human interactions, and in some ways the truth is far more impressive than messages sent by tower signal.
The internet – arguably the most important resource in the modern world – is very tangible and fairly vulnerable. It exists in large part under our feet, by way of an intricate system of rope-thin underwater and underground cables hooked to giant data storage units.
The article wants to make the point that "the internet" (monolithic) depends on cables and power-hungry data centers. Its graphic depiction of how ocean and underground cables are laid, and the sheer extent of them, is compelling. The "vulnerability" of this network isn't addressed but clearly power failures and strategic bombings are what they are implying. The article should give any reader pause to consider how un-ecological all this hardware and cable-repairing is. But the "only one-percent of interactions are by satellite" datum elides the enormous cell-phone infrastructure that works in tandem with these cables and servers. "Towers" are mentioned but those do more than just beam signals into space.