Just saw [this post](https://www.instagram.com/reel/CrivNA3LNel/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=) and I know it’s a very oversimplification, but what are these cables and what do they exactly do ? And who repairs, manages these cables.
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The Internet is a network, those cables provide a communication between various services but they don’t necessary forward your traffic.
When you visit a website major parts of it (like the scripts and images) are served by CDN, a content distribution network, that is hosted somewhere close to you. You ask that server for the image on Reddit post and if it doesn’t have it stored then it calls the actual reddit server and gives it you. That way the image is transmitted only once over the transatlantic cable no matter how many people in your area view it. Only when you actually do some change like posting a comment it may be transmitted somewhere far away.
The big websites (like Facebook) are fragmented and keep their local stuff local so the selfies of your coworkers may be kept on servers in your city but when you want to check on your distant relative the images will be transmitted from far away.
The popular streaming services even keep their servers in your ISP so when you watch a popular movie it may be transmitted from somewhere down the street instead of somewhere further (but not far away, they also keep stuff on country level, national level and so on). That also means they will recommend you watch something that is popular in your area. The ISP and the streaming service are both happy because they have to pay less for the transfer costs.
In the days before https was on every website everyone could cache the websites. So even in very small communities like a dorm there could be a server set up to cache the content of popular websites. If a hundred students would check a popular news site every morning you could just make a one web request to it and then serve it locally to save bandwidth.
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