Slashdot Mirror
New Submarine Cable Planned Between SE Asia and US
el_flynn writes "BusinessWeek is reporting on a new submarine cable system that will link South East Asia directly with the USA. Designated Asia-America Gateway (AAG), the project will involve a consortium of 17 international telcos, including AT&T Inc, India's Bharti AirTel, BT Global Network Services, CAT Telekom (Thailand), Eastern Telecommunications Philippines Inc (Philippines), Indosat (Indonesia) and Pacific Communications Pte Ltd (Cambodia). Led by Telekom Malaysia Berhad, the project is slated for completion in 2008, where 20,000km of cables will be providing a capacity of up to 1.92 Terabits per second of data bandwidth. Interestingly, the fibre-optic cable system will be taking a different route from many existing cables to avoid quake-prone areas and a repeat of the disruption to Asian web access caused by a tremor off Taiwan four months ago."
Satellites == restricted bandwidth since it has to go by some frequency on the radio band.
Satellites == susceptible to solar storms, debris, and (soon) attack from ground/air based lasers and high inertia weapons.
Satellites == poor TCP performance (doesn't mean you could not use another format of course:http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/470799.html).
Satellite == "High Bandwidth" is in gigabytes per second (not Tbits). So you would need a lot of them. Latency is 400ms. That's pretty high.
Satellite == roughly 80,000 miles via satellite vs roughly 12,000 via cable.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
As these are Fibre Optic cables it is quite simple to locate breakages using a device known as an Optical Time Domain Reflectometer (OTDR). You send an optical pulse down the cable and measure to see if you get reflections. If there is a break in the cable the laser will reflect off the discontinuity. The time taken for the reflection to return will give you the distance between the test point and the break as the speed of light in the cable is a known quantity.
If you then want to fix the cable you need to get to it and splice the broken fibre(s) back together. AFAIK this is done by hooking the fibre optic cable from a boat and hauling it to the surface (there is quite a bit of slack in the cables and they are well armoured) you then locate the fault and repair the break.
This isn't a replacement for the Trans-Atlantic cables, this is a redundant route so that people in South-East Asia and Australasia have an alternate route for getting traffic to the US when the cables that pass through Japan and/or Taiwan are damaged.
> 1. How does one find/fix breakages in 20,000 km of cable?
You drag a plow along the ocean floor until it snags the cable, you gently bring it to the surface, then you repair it on your cable repair ship: http://www.fas.org/irp/program/collect/t-arc.htm
" Satellites == poor TCP performance (doesn't mean you could not use another format of course:http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/470799.html " http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/470799.html, File not Found Did you mean to cite "Congestion Control for High Bandwidth-Delay Product Networks" XCP : http://www.sigcomm.org/sigcomm2002/papers/xcp.pdf ?
I'm not sure where you got your info from (or why the mods might think it interesting), though you are misinformed. Attenuation in modern fiber is about 0.3db/km (or less), scattering is more of a problem than attenuation. The cable run between repeaters is closer to 200 kilometres.a tion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_communic
The big hook is used to find the cable so that they can drag it up to the ship, the last thing they are going to do with a multi-billion dollar investment is damage it further by snapping it completely in half based on where they 'think' the break should be.
As you mentioned, undersea cables are fairly heavy, how you figure such a beast might float to the surface is beyond me. (Though you made me laugh)
The reason it took them so long to fix the cables off the coast of Taiwan was because there were several of them, all damaged at many points along along their length. With only a tiny handful of ships capable of doing the job, most of it during stormy sea conditions, they did a brilliant job to get it done in the short time that they did.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);