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."
Well duh! Taking a different route gives redundancy in the case of natural disaster/ deliberate attack clobbering one line. That's pretty common practice for laying cables, power lines, microwave links etc. It has been done for years.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"Nothing for you to see hear."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Neil Stephenson's "Mother Earth Mother Board" is an great non fiction read about the cable laying culture: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr .html
1. How does one find/fix breakages in 20,000 km of cable? How would this be not much worse than repairing the trans-Atlantic cables, from a cost-benefit view?
2. Why must such a link be terrestrial/oceanic? Why not use satellite links?
But something tells me that there will be lots of filtering and other very tight controls over this network. I hope people will find a way around it should that happen.
What?
This is why the USS Jimmy Carter was built!
are spooks from that Co. list - but that's implied anyway, one would expect...
So is this cable going to tie in to Kinakuta at any point? I want my data haven!
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
"BusinessWeek is reporting on a new submarine cable system that will link South East Asia directly with the USA."
I'm in southern China, and the way I heard it was "...a new submarine cable system that will link the USA directly with South East Asia."
I heard they send out 'Larry the Cable Guy'
Yeah, then we can get our spam so much faster...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Anyone know of any maps of the proposed cable route?
TFA quotes that a "low-risk route was designed to avoid the volatile and hazardous Pacific Ring, thus mitigating the effects from natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis."
However, This page, specifically this diagram from Wikipedia, shows that there really isn't any way to avoid the so-called "Pacific Ring of Fire", as the PRF is essentially a nearly continuous series of oceanic trenches, island arcs, and volcanic mountain ranges and/or plate movements. And the countries to be connected - Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Hong Kong, the Philippines - sit neatly in this zone. So there really _isn't_ any mitigating natural disasters. Unless they're just talking about the type of tsunamis that recently hit the Indian Ocean areas.
As a side note, ninety percent of the world's earthquakes and 81% of the world's largest earthquakes occur along the Ring of Fire.
The Wknd Sessions - Malaysian and South East Asia independent music
Maybe this is a dumb question, but if I could somehow go 20,000 feet underwater, in the middle of the Pacific and walk on the ocean floor, at some point I might trip over a cable, is that the idea?
Pretty much. They've been laying them for over a hundred years, so there's probably quite a few to stumble upon if you're ambling around the right areas. Some are more buried in the sand than others, but they're all pretty much sitting on the surface. In fact, to repair them, they drag a hook along the ocean floor until they snag, then they reel it in like a fish.
How do they know when it's touched bottom so they can move 100 feet forward and lay down some more?
Knowing the depth of the water and the amount they've spooled out gives them a pretty good idea of where it is.
Can they attach cameras and lights with batteries, wait for the thing to sink and then look around down there until the batteries die?
Probably. But generally the kind of kit you send down that far for science is the kind that you want to reel back in eventually.
If an aircraft carrier sunk in the middle of the Pacific and sunk 20,000 ft to the bottom could it crush the wires?
It takes much less than an aircraft carrier to sever such a cable. Anchors, fishing trawlers, and sharks have all been known to do the trick.
How thick is the thing when it's 20,000 feet down running up and down underwater mountains and valleys?
Not very thick at all. A few inches. Closure to shore it may be thicker, encased in more "armor", as there are more threats (as above: anchors, etc.) And no, it's unlikely you could dive down and splice in, for this reason, not to mention the more technical issues.
Could I go snorkeling someplace and see it when it comes up on shore? How to they protect it from terrorists with scuba gear?
Probably, somewhere. Some places it comes right up onto the beach, often surrounded by barbed-wire fences, then into a building where it's redirected underground. In other places, it's buried into the sea bed near shore and then goes underground to the terminal. Terrorist attack probably isn't that big a concern, as close to shore is the easiest and cheapest place to repair any damage.
Where do they "plug it in" when it comes up on shore? What do they plug into?
If you've seen one sturdy-looking telecom building, you've seen them all. Some might be built more like bomb shelters (or rather, as bomb shelters) than others, but for the most part, they're dull, short, windowless buildings. Inside the cable plugs into an expensive box with blinking lights connected to other boxes with blinking lights. Usually there's a telephone handset for talking to the guy on the other end.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
There's one section in it, that reads somewhat differently today than it did in 1996:You know, I think he might have hit a little closer to the truth with that one than he might have realized at the time.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
They wanted a monopoly on underwater fiber snooping
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Let's see, that means the equivalent of 2000 gigabit connections, which is about 2 million megabit connetions. Given that a decent voice stream will require, say, 128kb, that's about 15 million concurrent VOIP streams simultaneously. Not bad!
Yarg!
Same place they have always been: hiding in their money bin with Scrooge McDuck waiting for a real rival in the local Broadband Internet market to take them on. They haven't done ANYTHING in recent years, not until Labor unveiled their plan for a National Broadband Network (that they would probably not be party to).
All they do is fail to innovate and then threaten to sue people who want to use "their" infrastructure to build a better network. I can't believe people let the Government sell the whole Monopoly off. That's what happens when you get majority control of the upper and lower house.
Personally, I am wondering why there aren't other Australian 'telcos' trying to get control of a feed into this Country in order to take control of the domestic market. Hopefully given some time they will have enough money to build some competition aganist Telstra in the Broadband market.
Cheers, Chris
Just filter out the spam sent from that region of the world... No increase in bandwidth would be necessary...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In fact the main connection at the moment between Australia and the US is owned (mostly/totally?) by Optus (Singtel). Telstra have recently announced they are going to build a cable from Sydney to Hawaii and according to this article Telstra are also part of the consortium building this cable... which starts in SE-Asia, but importantly connects Hawaii to US west coast: http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,21 644115%5E15320%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html/
So in fact its Telstra that is building some competition to the existing cable - although I agree entirely regarding the broadband market here.
This new announcement also completes the picture for Telstra, they will have new cable all the way from Australia to Hawaii to west coast US.
There are a *lot* of cables on that route. The December 2006 Taiwan quake took out N-1 or maybe N-2 of the cables there, and multiple segments of several of them. The cables had enough diversity to deal with problems like ship anchors and fishing nets; the earthquake trashed them all at once, and mostly in deep water. There weren't close to enough cable repair ships on that side of the world to fix them all at once, and weather delayed the repairs as well (plus repairs are a lot slower in deep water.) You can see some good maps at telegeography.com.
This cable sounds like a big big win. I haven't seen a map of the route yet, just press releases, but if it goes around the other side without going all the way down to Sydney, it'll not only cut a few tens of milliseconds off the route, and add a lot of (potential, if not necessarily actually lit up for a while) bandwidth, but it'll make a major difference to reliability. The Telekom Malaysia PR person said: "This low-risk route was designed to avoid the volatile and hazardous Pacific Ring, thus mitigating the effects from natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis."
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The correct "CAT Telekom" spelling is "CAT Telecom". It's mispelled from the news source.
As another person who lost internet access outside of Thailand almost entirely after the Taiwan earthquake I find this very interesting indeed and it makes my day. As things are now, I lose at least half my bandwidth when I try to connect internationally. A better connection to the US would be literally a dream come true. CAT Telecom has a lousy 450 meg pipe to the International gateway. http://202.44.204.43/webstats/internetmap_current. php?Sec=internetmap_current
Make that 2.5 gig, I misread the map.
...allowing servicemen aboard US Submarines to receive the same lousy cable TV service from Comcast that you get.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
undersea cables: Neal Stephenson's brilliant essay 'Mother Earth mother board'
That's what Jimmy Carter is doing today! (well, the USS Jimmy Carter)
Wow that sounds amazingly similar to what happens in Mexico... Telmex (the company owned by the 2nd richest man in the world) was given as a free gift when it was privatized by the government and now it is nothing less than a huge monopoly which abuses its power . Mexico has one of the most expensive telephone tarifs and the Internet was the same (until cable companies started fighting the monopoly).
Now, the electricity company is testing Internet over power lines technology in order to provide cheaper and better internet services. I am sure Mr. Slim must be shaking by the mention of "VoIP", as I know several people that have been using it instead of the incredibly overpriced long distance calls...
Monopoly and corruption... I thought it was a trademark of Mexico =oP
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
A while back I was under the impression that only Cable & Wireless still had a fleet capable of laying such cables, but I haven't kept up with it. Who does the actual bedding of the cable this time?
I found the whole technology involved rather impressive..
Insert
I'm here in Thailand, and latency to anything in the US is an absolute killer. I can't even play BF2 it's so bad. I've included a traceroute to our favoutiet website...slashdot!
traceroute to 66.35.250.150 (66.35.250.150), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 * * *
2 ppp-124.120.243.1.revip2.asianet.co.th (124.120.243.1) 66.286 ms 67.060 ms 66.054 ms
3 ppp-210.86.189.71.revip.asianet.co.th (210.86.189.71) 63.658 ms 63.607 ms 81.493 ms
4 10.169.71.1 (10.169.71.1) 82.281 ms 80.316 ms 80.187 ms
5 * * *
6 61-90-133-238.static.asianet.co.th (61.90.133.238) 72.350 ms 61-90-132-86.static.asianet.co.th (61.90.132.86) 71.236 ms 61-90-133-238.static.asianet.co.th (61.90.133.238) 69.281 ms
7 61-90-133-237.static.asianet.co.th (61.90.133.237) 27.271 ms 63.608 ms 100.221 ms
8 61-90-254-89.static.asianet.co.th (61.90.254.89) 102.553 ms 102.423 ms 103.495 ms
9 203-144-144-6.static.asianet.co.th (203.144.144.6) 101.568 ms 100.922 ms 98.558 ms
10 TIG-Net28-1.trueinternetgateway.com (122.144.28.1) 168.946 ms 168.597 ms 165.327 ms
11 TIG-Net26-210.trueinternetgateway.com (122.144.26.210) 401.433 ms 399.596 ms 400.091 ms
12 US-ICR-DC1-26-222.trueinternetgateway.com (122.144.26.222) 396.819 ms 423.391 ms 421.568 ms
13 GigabitEthernet3-0.IG3.PAO1.ALTER.NET (157.130.211.77) 381.657 ms 381.962 ms 337.684 ms
14 0.so-1-2-0.XL2.PAO1.ALTER.NET (152.63.51.138) 271.284 ms 269.688 ms 269.807 ms
15 0.so-5-0-0.XL2.SCL2.ALTER.NET (152.63.57.42) 318.838 ms 318.321 ms 317.285 ms
16 0.so-7-0-0.BR1.SCL2.ALTER.NET (152.63.57.101) 316.262 ms 316.723 ms 315.788 ms
17 cpr2-pos-9-0.sanjoseequinix.savvis.net (208.175.172.169) 282.582 ms 359.365 ms 343.811 ms
18 bhr2-pos-0-0.santaclarasc8.savvis.net (208.173.55.26) 346.265 ms 346.529 ms 345.874 ms
19 csr1-ve241.santaclarasc8.savvis.net (66.35.194.42) 343.856 ms 341.470 ms 340.751 ms
20 66.35.212.174 (66.35.212.174) 342.154 ms 340.613 ms 339.629 ms
21 slashdot.org (66.35.250.150)(H!) 338.583 ms (H!) 337.364 ms (H!) 337.475 ms
I just got out of the bathroom. That's some cable-laying culture in there ...
Looks like a lot more than 2.5 Gbps, though most of the connections aren't bigger than that. I don't know whether the part of CAT that matters to you is IIG or NIX, but it looks like there are a lot of connections to other Internet carriers in the region, either within Thailand or else out to IIJ, C&W, etc. The TOT gateways aren't much bigger than 2.5 Gbps, but there's a total of 19+ Gbps, which is pretty respectable for a country the size of Thailand.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'd prefer cables going to NZ/Aus. The internet service there is third-world.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
great now the spam will come @ 1.92Terabytes faster
why not have a cable that is buoyant such that it floats just a few hundred feet (or whatever safety margin is wanted) or so off the sea floor. If you wanted to avoid the problems of the sea floor I imagine that at those depths there arent too many large things to run into it.. but who knows.