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 ..."

Comments

Use cables to find your way home

[DreamerFi]

A good sysadmin always carries around a few feet of fiber. If he ever finds himself lost, and doesn't know the way out of whatever place he is, he simply drops the fiber on the ground and waits ten minutes, and then talks the backhoe operator for directions..

It's still broken, but they're redundant

[wolvie_]

The Southern Cross Cable that was broken actually still isn't online - the original outage had no expected time of recovery, given the break occurred 34km off the coast of Sydney, where conditions over the weekend were up to 19m swells (oh, and normal recovery time is 20 days according to the SCC site).

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.

Re:I've always wondered how they do that.

[sstrick]

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.

I did the same thing...

[BiggestPOS]

When my powersupply went out last week. I gathered all my coworkers around, said a eulogy, the whole nine yards. I then slowly lowered its box into an RMA box to send it back to the vender. I even got the UPS man to play along as a pall-bearer. I took a bunch of pictures on my nikon, I'll have a site up soon

In related news....

[Anaxagor]

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.

paint eyes on it

[beanerspace]

One approach to cleaning up dead cable might be to eyes and scales on it, and then spread a rumor amongst Asian fishermen about a large, succulent eel that resides between Austraila & New Zeland ... which when boiled is a potent aphrodisiac.

If nothing else, it might keep them busy enough to save a whale or two.