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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."
I guess this means we can expect to hear from Tux more often.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
This seems like an awefully expensive, challenging way to fix this problem. Are they going to need repeters to stretch fiber that distance?
Spencer Ogden
and i cant get DSL cuz i'm 200' too far from the CO?
Can you just imagine what your ping time would be while playing Quake? Sheeesh. At least my Athlon wouldnt need the super fan I have on it now, just stick it outside to run. Although I suspect it would melt a hole in the ice! ;)
An optimist believes we live in the best world possible; a pessimist fears this is true.
I wonder if the routers will freeze more often. But of course not! They will use Linux, and so will be perfectly at home!
Wouldn't it be much easier to establish a permanent cable connection to one of the islands off of Antarctica where ice variations would not be an issue? Then you could establish a wireless relay (microwave or other) from their to the south pole stations.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
Broadband? South Pole? Internet? Penguins? I know there's some sort of wry humor in there somewhere.
cool :)
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Well, wonderful... we can get broadband to the south pole, but tough luck if you live in Cow's Ass, Montana.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
"If they can get broadband to the South Pole, why the hell can't we get it where we live?"
It's amazing how they are going to put
:-P
"broadband cable 1600 km over polar ice"
Or do you mean across polar ice...
I think cable 1600 km over polar ice would be far more impressive though.
~ kjrose
those researchers probably dont know that napster got shut down.
Napster is dead; long live WinMX, the successor to Napster for Windows and x86 Linux.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Finally, we'll start getting more .aq sites out there!!
I've yet to see a fibre optic cable of any kind that could survive any significant stretching. These guys are talking stretching on a glacial scale. There's just no way they will be able to overcome this.
Now, as an earlier post mentioned, running the cable to a coastal area or an island beyond the serious ice and relaying the signal via wireless is a lot more feasible. Of course the reliability will still be an issue as storms of antarctic proportion will impede even the best radio/microwave/laser setups.
In the end, I suspect that they will simply have to put up another satellite.
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)
11*43+456^2
If we wait a few more years we can do an undersea cable.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
If I have a laptop at the SOUTH POLE, I can check my e-mail and read Slashdot. If I'm at home, 20,000 feet from Qwest's CO, I have to use dialup.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Now I can say with authority "If they can get it to the South Pole, you can get it here." next time I call AT&T BI.
"Derp de derp."
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.
No, I don't want to explore the Recycle Bin.
Iridium is back up and running, covers the entire planet (the satellites are in low polar orbits) and the U.S. Government has a bulk buy deal on Iridium satellite minutes. (DoD now owns part of the system, having bought in after the bankruptcy.)
Hands up: who thinks wireless (microwave, 802.11, whatever) would be a much better idea here?
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
Instead of laying the cable in a straight line, you lay it in S-shapes. Big S-shapes. That way, there's LOTS of slack, say 500% slack, for the ice sheet movement.
Of course, you have to use a fairly flexible conduit -- copper piping should do nicely, as long as you can figure out how to make sure it doesn't kink too badly on compression. The S-shapes, again, would help, but a better material would be even better. Maybe copper line with a thick kevlar braid, along the lines of the braid used in a Chinese finger puzzle/trap.
The Canadian Armed Forces has to recalibrate their microwave dishes every eight years or so up north for CFS Alert on Elsmere Island, because the ice moves. That gets expensive in the long run (Snowcats, helicopters, men), and would be MUCH worse for Antarctica.
And finally, finding a break in the fiber wouldn't be too hard, ever heard of a time-delay reflectometer?
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Some of the data transfer they might want will probably be very data and time sensitive. Wireless just won't cut it. Think if the Internet vs Internet2. Internet2 is need by certain apps just because of things like QOS, bandwidth, etc.
Oh and of course the power thing....but that has already been mentioned.
[Please type your sig here.]
Even odder are some of the "No Service Possible" field checks that we get from Business Customers in Greensboro. Hmm I wonder what the build cost is on that. (I work for a large cable ISP...)
$6/ft*5,249,344ft == $31,496,062 USD. Well that's just to drop the cable. And that assumes that the cable we have will work with the cold.
So double that number and.. it's about 63 million dollars. That's a hefty field check.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Perhaps running the cabling in a conduit that is filled with warm oil or water would be good. You could have it in a pipe and have heaters every X distance. Either that or just a super insulated shielding. The laser itself produces a good bit of heat. I forget if the high powered lasers would heat it any to begin with.
I guess they need a bungie cord/fibre solution now though eh? Those glaciers moving can be a little dangerous to little olde fibre.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Maybe they could just put up two really tall towers, one at each end, and do microwave transmission.
Then, if something ever breaks due to the extreme environment, you'd know where to find the problem.
Now, just how tall would those towers have to be?
Well, if the target station is at 75 degrees, then...
7926 miles (earth diameter)/2 - cos((90-75)/2)*(7926 miles)/2 = 34 miles.
hmmmm... maybe a cable is a better idea after all. Can someone check my math?
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
They have compact wind power devices from Windside, a Finnish company. Their equipment regularly runs at -60C, not sure how much colder it could take, though.
For the summer, supplemental solar would work, and batteries (somehow magically kept warm) can provide a good buffer.
One interesting note: I think the ice shifts about 10 meters per year at the pole. Don't know what the rest of Antarctica is like, but it presents an interesting problem if they are planning on laying the cable on the ground...
It's got to be better than what they currently have. I was actually thinking about "wintering over" down there. They get an email-grade connection to the satellites about 4 times a day. That's it.
Ok, stick me in a tin can at the most isolated spot on Earth for 6 months. Ok, no sun for that entire period. Ok, the harshest conditions on the planet outside, and not exactly the Hilton inside. But no internet connection? Dealbreaker.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
True. It's hard to imagine places that I've been, like Yosemite, being totally under ice. Yet, it was.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
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"The station's winter personnel are isolated between mid-February and late October."
If anyone deserves to get high-speed access to porn...
Last month, Wired ran an article about the new construction at the South Pole. It makes no mention of this fiber.
As an Engineer for one of the Telephone Companies, I can tell you that fiber is stronger than you think. I had a pole get hit, knocking the cables the ground- a few 18 wheelers drove over the cables, partially crushing a copper cable. But, the two fiber cables were uninjured (part of their sheathing was shorn away, though).
Still, running fiber to the South Pole is idiotic- think of how long (and how costly) the FLAG project was!
And does it move? Or has progress killed it off, just like the barber poles here?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Check out Andrew Corporation's HELIAX line of coax cables. http://www.andrew.com/products/trans_line/default. aspx
a spx
This is semirigid coaxial cable in LARGE diameters. The outer conductor is solid copper, not braided.
The trick to flexibility is that the copper jacket has a helical corrugation - Much more flexibility, MUCH harder to kink. For what amounts to a variant of 1/2-inch copper pipe filled with PE foam, their FSJ4 superflexible coax is AMAZINGLY flexible. (Sucks compared to our friend RG58, but as I said, given its diameter and the fact that the outer shield is solid, it's impressive.)
In fact, I believe Andrew does make fiber optic cables based on the Heliax concept.
Yup - http://www.andrew.com/products/trans_line/amarra.
In addition they have fiberglass-epoxy composite jacket cable.
Disclaimer: I do work for Andrew, although not for the division in question.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Lovely solution, just one problem: They don't stay put.
Sure over the equator they can orbit at the same rate the planet rotates and so appear "fixed" but that only works over that narrow ecliptic. Instead to cover extreme N. & S. latitudes one needs sats on a much more inclined orbit and then they're out of sight much of the time, a dozen or so would be required to provide continuous coverage. That means a couple of expensive launches, a serious of expensive sats, and of course their own-going management (course-corrections, problem resolution, etc.)
Why not build a series of microwave repeaters or such, bring the cable to the shore then broadcast the rest of the way? A couple of reasons:
Yes fiber isn't the most robust material on its own. On the other hand it can be clad in all sorts of super-durable materials to protect it.
To protect from stretching the fiber might be coiled inside an outer cladding so it's 2x or 3x as long as required. Or it could be threaded through an outer cladding (think 'garden hose') so it can slide back and forth under slight tension between 1km "reservoir" loops.
Of course there's still the problem of powering the repeaters, but then that's why this contract is out there: To get folks interested in solving the problem.
Hmm, what would the Thunderbirds have done?
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Alternatively, they could maybe drill a hole 4km down and lay the cable as is customary on the sea floor. At least it'd only break along the last 4km. We can drill 4km holes in ice, right? (send a hot metal thing down?)
You'd probably want a 4km deep trench. Otherwise you'd need some kind of mole to drag 1,600 km of cable behind it.
They are really quite different enviroments. The Antarctic is a *continent.* There are no 'iceflows.' There is also comparitively little drifting of free snow, Antarctica is the most arid desert on earth, precipitaion being measured in handfulls of inchs per *century.*
The glacial icepacks are *miles* deep in places and heating the cable would see it sinking down to the bottom, to be crushed and ripped apart by the *expansion and contraction* of the glacial mass. The ice does not 'move' anymore than it does on your lawn.
KFG
However me and the other penguins are probably going to get busted for swapping illegal Whale Song MP3's now....
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
The theories posed here are interesting. One fact has not been stated:
Things you build on ice or tundra or whatever froze will sink below the ice surface. Re-adjustments because the ice is moving???? Not always.
Look at the houses / buildings built on arctic areas. They are on stilts. That is to they can:
1.) Insulate themselves from the ground. Not to make the inside warmer, but to keep the outside cooler. The heat from someting will cause the ground to melt.
2.) They can jack up the stilts of the building/house after it does sink.
A cable on ice will be, IMHO, thrashed. The ice moves, opens, and closes. Steel cables to protect it? No way. Not strong enough. And then put something heavy ( the copper pipe idea ) on the ice? The pipe will create heat on the ice just by being there. And then it will sink.
This idea needs more thought.
I was in Longyearbyen, Svalbard ( 4 hour flight north of Norway ) last week. I've seen it first hand. They were digging up a cable in the center of town last week because the cable was shifting. Putting this cable down was like building a road. Layers of big rocks, layers of small rocks, then paper, then the cable.
This was in an area of tundra, not ice. The ice would be worse. And 1500 km? I'd hate to be the guy in the service truck on that account.
Bill
Send in Playboy Playmates via chopper/seaplane/whatever. The guys in Antarctica deserve better than a flat JPEG, no matter how fast it can be downloaded.
I'm the stranger...posting to
I went to Dome C, now renamed Concordia, twice, in 1997 and 2000 to install some atmospheric physics experiments. I had to lay some cable there. Although it doesn't snow much (at most one mm / day), after 2 months the cables were buried and difficult to remove. We have to use expensive teflon coated cables so they won't break from the cold (-25~-50C in summer and down to -80C in winter, colder than South pole itself).
They want to lay the cable between Concordia and South pole for various reasons: Concordia is a joint French/Italian project that started in 1997 and should be operational for winterover in 2004. The french have lots of experience with ground raids to resupply station from the coast (Dumont d'Urville); while the Americans always fly C-130 to the Pole.
There has never been any land raid between Dome C and South pole, although a woman skied it alone in 1999 (pictures on my site as well). The flow of ice is non-existent at Dome C, for the simple reason that the several 'domes' are local ice summits from which the ice flows. They will certainly run into problems of stretching cables nearer to the pole though.
But from Dome C to where ? Right now the communications are very limited: one email connection a day, expensive NOAA phone calls/fax, Irridium when they are not bankrupt... It would be impossible to lay another cable between DC and the coast for the simple reason that the ice accelerates it's flow and it gets full of crevasses... Maybe a dedicated antenna can reach a geostationary satellite, but that's not the way it works right now.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Instead of going to the expense of laying a few thousand miles of fibre, why not just adapt RFC 1149 to the local conditions? In addition to a huge cost-saving, it's a Linux friendly solution!
Overall, I'd say putting a satellite constellation (say, 4 satellites so one's always visible) in non-equatorial orbit would be one plan, and a wire to a spot where at least 2 geostationary satellites are visible would be the other. Wireless links won't cut it here. Even if you could put a couple of the towers on specially picked mountains, you'd still have too much possibility of failure.
On the other hand, and in an off the wall comment, if I were doing this, I'd include in the contract a requirement for an elliptical 1m wide, 1.25m high space running the length of the inside of the conduit. Its going to be a huge conduit already, might as well make it multi-purpose, right? Imagine being able to just hit the antarctic coast and taking a tube-shuttle from the coast to the station. Wheee!!!
Antarctica is primarily solid land with ice-shelves hanging off portions.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
As far as pressure melting the ice, that only happens if the ambient temperature is already near the freezing point. Otherwise, all the buildings at the south pole would already have sunk to the bottom of the ice! The buildings are exerting a lot more pressure per unit of surface area than a fibre is capable of withstanding without breaking.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I've read that about forty percent of Americans believe in creationism rather than evolution; that statistic specifically excludes believers in theistically-guided evolution, too. I'm inclined to suspect that the vast majority of such Believers are in fly-over country. Interestingly, only 5% of scientists hold that belief - I would presume, too, that those scientists worked in fields such as chemistry or other domains entirely free of data relating to speciation or life.
The south pole gets broadband before *I* do in Ohio????
Global Crossing?
-twb
Just them in at the start of the transportation window, and bring them out before the window closes.
I'm the stranger...posting to