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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.
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
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.
Keep in mind light speed is slow and latency is an issue esp if we are talking geostationary orbit, which
But you know most of the data is going to be spam anyway, and you don't need low ping times for that data.
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.
Interesting, however, I think it would have been more apt were this ship named USS Richard Nixon.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
No need. Cable goes through Hawaii anyway and is under part American ownership by surprise surprise AT&T. Which we all know does not bend over to NSA and USA govt at their slightest whim even on internal in-the USA communications. Cough... Cough...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
You forgot to mention that it's harder snoop on a directional satellite than to tap a cable run.
There are a bunch of classified patents covering the mechanism(s) by which the US Navy splices into the transoceanic fiber runs. (IIRC, some company had been working on the technology a few years ago & the Feds classified all their work)
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
I admit I shouldn't use the word "float", but it's a slang for "bringing something up from undersea"
More details here. They do a much better job at explaining this-
From the article:
To effect repairs on deep cables, the damaged portion is brought to the surface using a grapple. Deep cables must be cut at the seabed and each end separately brought to the surface, whereupon a new section is spliced in. The repaired cable is longer than the original, so the excess is deliberately laid in a 'U' shape on the sea-bed. A submersible can be used to repair cables that are near the surface.
Another link from Taipei Times-
The grapnel is a metal tool about 46cm by 61cm with a cutter like a fine razor blade and a grabbing tool. As tension increases and the cable is slowly pulled up, it is cut, grabbed, and half of it is hoisted to the surface. Dropping the grapnel, dragging the sea bed and recovering the cable can take about 16 hours, Walters said.
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