Broadband To Hit The South Pole

Albanach writes: "According to this story from the BBC bids are being invited to lay a fibre-optic cable some 1600 kilometres over polar ice, linking researchers at the South Pole with the rest of the planet. Currently, researcher's communications rely upon older satellites that have drifted from their geostationary orbits into ones that are now at least partly visible from the pole. The new cable will be laid on top of the 4km ice cap, and will have to cope with repeated freezing and stretching as the ice moves."

Comments

I can hear it now --

[pyramid termite]

"If they can get broadband to the South Pole, why the hell can't we get it where we live?"

Why not wireless?

[photon317]

It would seem Antartica provides one of the most hostile environments imaginable for wires, especially fragile fiber. Someone may come up with a very novel cabling system that might work, but despite all efforts chances are it will break down in the first year of use because of some onforseen engineering complications.

So... why not go wireless? They seem to only consider satellites as wireless options, but why no ground-based wireless?

Surely for this amount of money one could devices a wireless repeater system to be more stable. Apparently you only have to get the signal about 2000km to Concordia and you're good to go - so why not deploy a wireless repeater station every X kilometers?

There are no obstructions in the path except for snow/ice storms in the air - surely one can find a frequency that deals with this problem well and provides decent bandwidth ver a decent distance right? If you can go 20km at a time it's only 100 repeater stations along the way (or maybe you'd place 2-3 of them 1 km or so apart at each repeat point for redundancy)

Re:Why not wireless?

[mikeplokta]

I thought of this, too. But how are you going to power those wireless repeaters. Solar is a bit of a bust, since it's dark for five or six months of the year. Of course, you could always lay a power cable...

Radio, not wire

[innate]

This seems like an exceptionally fragile way to get broadband, after all the ice sheets on which the cable is laid are constantly moving. The Amundsen station itself has moved over the years. Locating and repairing the cable when it inevitably snaps is going to be very expensive.

Unfortunately a microwave-based solution would be overwhelmed by the weather conditions there. And RF probably won't provide enough bandwidth. So they may not have many other options.

Re:Challenge

[barawn]

Actually, I think you misunderstood the satellite issue: they're not using satellites for themselves - they're using satellites that other people put up, and have drifted from their geosynchronous orbits - which is over the equator, and not visible from the pole - into an orbit which is "mostly" geosynchronous, but visible from the pole.

This leads to spotty, poor internet connections (because it's not really geosynchronous, they do move, and they have to be not visible to the pole for some of their orbits) so they need another solution. More satellites would just produce the same current situation, and you definitely don't need to move the old ones back into place - they're working fine currently, but they're just 'spotty', and more importantly, the people who run those satellites probably WANT them in geosync orbit, so they do want to move them back. Fiber's a permanent and cheap solution to this.