People say cloud as if the work were in the sky. Most of it walks up a beach in a pipe and sits in a hall that needs a river of power.
The landing station is the exchange. The word cloud hides that.
Alphabet behaves like a cable company because it had to. MAREA, Dunant and Grace Hopper were not decoration. They were a response to concentration.
It is concentrated. A small number of physical places still carry a large share of other people’s Tuesday. That is a landing station and a fence, and sometimes a trawl.
Repair ships are few. A cut off Egypt or in the Red Sea has to wait its turn in a swell. The hyperscalers learned that after they had already put too much traffic through one door.
A spare path that holds through a cut is the only proof the second cable was real.
Landing stations are industrial sheds. The dependency is there, not in the marketing word.
Virginia Beach, the Cornish landings, and Bilbao are not interchangeable doors. A cut that hits the Red Sea and a cut that hits the Atlantic are different delays. Both show up as a number, not as a keynote.
Call it a cloud if you like. It still comes out of the sand.
The spare path that holds through a cut is the network. The beach at Virginia Beach or Cornwall is where that path comes ashore.
Cable reel on the quay.