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When A Cable Dies
highpingbastard writes: "Staff at Australian telecommunications carrier Telstra are going to hold a decomissioning ceremony for a 25-year-old voice and data cable spanning between Australia and New Zealand that died yesterday. Telstra was still using the 2Mbps cable as a backup circuit up until the time it was cut, probably by a ship's anchor. In general, undersea cables have a 25-year life span. A chance for all involved in the cable's long life to get closure. Australia's fastest looped network to the U.S., the (flash animation warning) Southern Cross Network Cable, also went down for 15 hours after it was snagged at the same time. It is supposed to have a 99.999 per cent network availability, or downtime amounting to 50 minutes over 10 years. Doh! That's 300 years' worth in one hit by my calculation ..."
The answer to this is in the article linked by the post immediately above you (right now). All undersea cables are clearly marked on standard navigation charts. You are supposed to own and follow those charts if you run a ship, which includes not knowingly dropping your anchor near delicate cables. If you do snag one it is therefore entirely your own fault and the telecom company will now hurl a lawsuit at you.
Not that I have a problem with that. It's one of the best feature articles I've ever read. Damned good book, too.
Don Negro
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
> the telecom company will now hurl a lawsuit at
>you.
What jurisdiction will entertain a lawsuit
in international waters?
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I want to buy a decomissioned submarine -- a diesel one -- and sneak around the globe snipping transoceanic cables. Cyberterrorism of the physical kind. Cut them in two places, several miles apart so that repair is virtually impossible. After ruining a few gigabits worth of transcontinental traffic, start demanding money from the data carriers who own and operate the cables. Boy would it be fun. And profitable.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
Mother Earth Mother Board
Mandatory reading for N.S. fans.
Another excellent read on the trials and tribulations of the cable layers comes ironically enough from Arthur C. Clarke (yes, the grandfather of the communications satellite & "2001" author, among others). It's called _How the World was One: Beyond the Global Village_ and is unfortunately out of print as far as I can tell. It did show up on Amazon's book seller search though.
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
Last week a flaming train (but not a flaming goatse.cx ;-) brings down another internet in North America.
Still later this week, inbreeding amongst network capital equipment vendors leads to crippling genetic susceptibility to one breed of worms (another reason for having a "mutt" network vice a "purebreed" network???)
What good is all that profound " internet survivability " if all the pipes are laid down in the same trench, tunnel, manhole using the same vendor's gear???
Any Network Infrastructure Engineers care to clue us in to why the pipes get placed in the same geographic location (+/- 1000 m)???
I believe Juanita
Ships are under the legistation of their home port, which is why they always have that painted on their bow, and have to fly the flag of the country.
Just to be pedantic...
50 minutes is not half an hour. 15 hours amounts to 170 years' worth of downtime.
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Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Someone read the press release and understand the situation. If I had mod points I would use them on this post. I work for an ISP who has multiple OC12s and OC3s on this network, and we didn't lose connectivity to our site in Sydney, we just had reduced capacity. That, and I can't stand the smarmy ppl talking about how the network promised 100% redundancy. You have to do maintanence on a network sometime, and shit happens sometimes when you are doing it, and people are just gonna have to live with it. Thanks for adding perspective.
//Phizzy
"Most European technology just isn't worth our stealing," -- Former CIA chief James Woolsey, referring to Echelon
Wired magazine has in its archives a (long) article by Neil Stephenson on the laying of undersea fiber.
In any other industry a 25-year old cable wouldn't be seen as anything special. Then again, I work for an electricity distributor, and routinely deal with cables laid 70 years ago, switches which could be sold as antiques and poles which are literally held up by the wires attached to them.
It must make things easier when you can actually talk to someone who was alive when the assets you're working on were installed.
The first undersea cable connection between Australia and New Zealand was commissioned on February 21, 1876.Is this a typo?
Gotta love how the Southerncross website information content is zip if you dont bother with flash.
Is it because they want to increase their pipe usage by feeding lots of useless crap over it?
TimC.
Dasmegabyte, about time someone said that.. I work in the telecom industry as a fiber optic splicer, and people have NO idea what a pain in the ass the stuff is to work on... An outdoor cable with that number of fibers (216 or so?) will take four hours just to get it ready to splice, before you ever set cleaver to glass. A good splicer, working in tandem with an assistant, and a good machine, might burn 24-36 in an hour, if he/she is experienced. A single guy working by himself with an older machine (far more common in the telecom industry) will burn 12 fibers in an hour, once you average things out. This stuff doesn't just coalesce out of thin air; it takes hard work to get it going.
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Were I in touch with the toilet that is humanity, I'd have flushed it long ago.
They should anounce that they have installed the ultimate firewall which is guaranteed impervious to cracking. Then just wait for some indignant black hat to find a way through it.
_O_
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Any Network Infrastructure Engineers care to clue us in to why the pipes get placed in the same geographic location (+/- 1000 m)???
IANANIE, but the short answer (no pun intended) is cost. The shorter you can make the cable run, the less it costs to lay the cable. When you take into consideration the distances involved for a transpacific or transatlantic cable run, there are only one or two routes that are economically feasible. In the situation where you already have a cable for a particular route, it may be sensible to lift the existing cable, strap the new one to it and performany necessary maintenance to the repeaters etc. on the old cable.
Is there body that governs international waters that acts analagously to the FTC? Or are you allowed to go traipsing wherever you want, without liability for damaging things like fibre cables?
If you're not wasted, the day is.
If you're not wasted, the day is.
The Southern Cross Cable is completely redundant, so they are justified in making their claims about uptime, but by some strange twist of fate, the second cable running out of Sydney was down for maintainance at the time of the break. The broken cable is still down, and they simply brought the second cable back up to fix everything. In any case, it didn't stop Internet connectivity for Australian users as some posters are suggesting; ISPs routed traffic onto other cable/satellite links, and while it was slower for users affected, it wasn't like Australia suddenly became broken off from the rest of the world.
If you're interested about how they lay and fix these types of cable out at sea, you should read this great article from Wired in 19996 by Neal Stephenson. It takes a while to read, but it covers everything from the development of the technology, to installing and maintaining it, how it's all linked up, and the economics behind it.
When the cable is in shallow water (several hundred metres) a plow is dragged infront of the cable as it is being layed.
It then lies in a shallow trench which later fills up with sand to offer some protection. Not enough to stop a ships anchor by the looks. Once the water gets deeper though it has to be layed straight on the bottom.
"Do you think we could wipe out world hunger forever if scientists figured out how to make AOL's Free CD's edible?"-
What, me worry?
(Tommy; are you out there? ;-)
;-)
A buddy of mine (who works with lasers for his research) about 15 years ago had LOS between his house on the west side of Cayuga Lake and his lab at Cornell on the east side (roughly 8 miles away). This was the days when a 9600 baud modem was the best thing going. Solution? You guessed it! IIRC, he got about 19.2 kbps out of that link (except during snowstorms
True story...
(We don't need no triple redundancy...)
Try http://innovations.copper.org/1998april/cable_evol ution.htm. Or search Google for "underwater cable".
In the James Burke series, "The Day The Universe Changed", one episode includes a part on how the ship which was first used to lay trans-Atlantic cable ended up doing that (hint: it wasn't built for that). Of course, you could also go here: http://www.oldcablehouse.com/cablestations/history .html. BTW, you can read James Burke "Connections" pieces at Scientific American (http://www.sciam.com or in the magazine each month.
woof.
Quit all the whining about moderation! Don't like how it works? Tough. I don't like your variable declarations, but I'm not pissing about them, am I? Oh wait, I just did.
Well, the first underwater telegraph cable that was laid was caught within a month by a fisherman who thought exactly that - that it was some heretofore undiscovered sea creature. More recently, while laying a cable off the coast of Taiwan, the Chinese went out and helped themselves to a repeater section. Neal Stephenson wrote a kick-ass article for Wired a few years ago about the laying of the FLAG cable from Japan to England. Give yourself a few hours and read.
this was one of the best Wired articles. Too bad they haven't done stuff like this since (Bill Joy's "influential" article notwithsanding).
sulli
RTFJ.
Australian Police are asking for public help in locating a man seen clinging to a New Zealand-registered rowboat, with a large propane cylinder hanging off the stern, trailing smoke and flames as it crossed the area at ridiculously high speed shortly before the cable was cut.
For us Americans...
A Telstra spokesman said today the link, laid "donkey's years ago", carried very little of the telco's network traffic before yesterday's cut.
This confused me, until I found the idiom.
(It wasn't here or here.)
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let me rephrase these two paragraphs, for those of us who might be confused by them:
A Telstra spokesman confirmed today that a container ship at the focus of investigations behind the Southern Cross Cable cut yesterday also appeared to have caught the 25-year-old Tasman 1 cable linking Sydney with Auckland in New Zealand.
The 2Mbps link, which until Sunday was still used as a backup route across the Tasman Sea, has been decomissioned as repair costs outweigh the benefits of maintaining the link.
As previously reported, the "Southern Cross Cable" was cut yesterday, unintentionally.
However, another cable, a 25-year-old one linking Sydney, Australia with Auckland, New Zealand was also cut. It was a "Tasman 1" type cable.
The ship that is at the focus of authorities' investigations for the first cutting is apparently responsible for this second cutting also.
This is according to a Telstra spokesperson.
This second cut link was a 2Mbps link. It was still in use until it was accidentally cut, but only as a backup route. It goes across the Tasman Sea.
Since being cut, it was decided that the line would be not be repaired, since the benefits of maintaining the link aren't worth the high repair costs.
It is now being "posthumously" decomissioned with a celebration party.
Phew!
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My cable modem dies every friday night 'cause the fscking operator can't deal with all the traffic, and I don't make a farewell ceremony to it...
Sarcastic ? Me ?
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What ? Me, worry ?
Of course, look while driving at your own risk - better yet, pull over on the shoulder before looking so you don't kill somebody :)
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
I live in a lakeside community which has a large lake for paddle boating, duck feeding, etc. (no swimming). My friend moved here a few years ago, directly across the lake from my house. We used to do morse code messages to each other and soon we we're talking about wiring up a network together. One night we took a paddle boat out and layed an insulated CAT-5 directly across the lake, instead of going all the way around (would have used much more cable because it's kind of elliptical in shape).
The connection works great and now we have connected up three other neighboors as well. The most difficult part was getting the cable into the homes by drilling through wood and cement, but it wasn't that big of a deal. It's kind of cool -- and you don't even have to be a giant telecommunications company. Don't know if it's against our association rules, but I still enjoy my nightly Quake-over-lake game!
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
And let's not forget that these guys are working with cable AT THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN. Get you, your assistant and your good machine under 300 feet of brine and dark and see how quick you go :)
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Well, you're mistaking complexity with redundancy...they aren't the same. A redudant system with four nodes can easily have an interconnect one jump from each node, so that no one missing node would stop traffic. A complex system of, say, 400 nodes, would not have the same luxury...that would mean a whole shitload of interconnects. So you can feign redundancy, with big pipes connecting each smaller network with the smaller nets fairly redundant -- but they're not truly redundant. And that means if you're a node at the back of a big pipe, you may not have much recourse to stay connected -- either the traffic is too great to reach the next big pipe before your TTL expires, or you just don't have an auxilliary branch because your link to the other networks WAS the big pipe. So bang: there goes your redundancy, because your network lost its redundancy.
This is why 99.999% is a crock of shit -- no network is that close to perfect -- because even if the system stays up when its connections go down, it's still failed. If 911 crashes, it can come back up quickly...but if the phones to the whole town are gone, then the system is basically ineffective.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Well, isn't that nice...a geek with a fantasy complex.
I hate to break it to ya, bub, but all claims of "99.999%" reliability with physical devices are outlandish lies. I can't even claim 98% reliability with my own alarm clock; how am I supposed to do so with a bank of servers attached to the same line on the same power supply running the same OS with the same specialized code? 99.999% is a marketing lie -- the internet will never have complete reliability, because it is far too complex and has too many variables.
Your line that customers should sue for gaps in reliability is just selfish and silly. There was no way the company could have sped up the process, or they would have done so...I'm sure this was a terrible embarrasment. So if a group of customers were to file suit, this would be nothing more than a nuisance. Southern Cross didn't purposefully bring them down and they handled it as quickly as possible. A break in about 200 pieces of glass, each thiner than your hair and wrapper with insulant, jelly, 1/2 steel pipe and a copper conductor is not as easy as splicing two wires under a car hood -- a process which takes me about five minutes per wire.
The internet is a self switching entity tied to a scant few superfast backbones, and can never be 100% reliable. The trend towards claims that approach 100% is dangerous, because it causes investors and customers to see real claims (such as 98% reliability, or 100% during business hours, 96% after 7 pm) as underrated. And when you're looking for a host for your data, what's most important is the real uptime. Trying to find meaning in "99.999&" is like looking for the leprechaun in a box of Lucky Charms.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
It depends on your ISP, the southern cross link is owned by Optus, the rest are owned by Telstra [with a few exceptions].
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
If nothing else, it might keep them busy enough to save a whale or two.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
You may ask, "why dont we use sattelite" - answer: too slow, think about all that extra distance to the stars, and then back.
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While, I can't be positive, my guess would be that when the Internet became commericalized, survivability for commerical applications was not important. Instead, its more important to make a profit. To make a profit, you do things as cheaply as possible, and you cut some corners.
Furthermore, the internet _did_ survive. One cable was cut, and a small portion fell of the map. The rest of us could operate fine outside of the affected area.
Its mostly a matter of cost and importance of the system. Buying books from Australia just isn't "mission critical" so it doesn't need to survive a nuclear blast. However, I'm willing to bet that any mission critical military systems that are on the internet do have proper redundancy in place. They don't care about profit.
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It seems to me that that huge link across the pacific isn't being used. I have tracerouted my connection to USA websites heaps of times, and everytime it goes via perth then out to england and across from there. Are any ISPs using the pacific link? Wasn't it supposed to be 40 Gbps or something?
Do they just lay the cable along the seabed floor?
Ok, here is the real secret. Qwest didn't start out as a communications company. Rather they kinda squeezed their way into it. Origionally they contracted out cable running jobs to telecoms like AT&T. AT&T would pay them to run 30 strands of fiber from say baltimore to DC. Well the expensive part is digging the hole. Now pay attention cause here is the trick. Since the ground was already open Qwest said, "Lets throw some extra fiber in there for us." The result is that instead of the 30 strands the AT&T paid for there were now like 200 strands. This leaves some rediculous amount of fiber belonging to qwest less than 10cm from everyone elses.
Now for the really sad part. Most of this fiber isn't even lit. Thats right 1000's of strands of fiber all over the US are dark right now. Why? My guess is because Qwest doesn't want to upset supply and demand.
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