Slashdot Mirror
How To Build a $188M Submarine Cable System
Bevan Slattery writes "PIPE Networks has launched a blog and an online progress report on the construction of its $188M (AU$200M), 6,900-km submarine cable system connecting Sydney (Australia) to Piti (Guam). People can follow the many tasks required to construct a submarine cable and track the project's progress. The daily blog provides unique insight into PPC-1's construction, including for example the different types of cable installed in 'benign' and 'aggressive' seabed conditions."
Fascinating stuff. I'm still amazed that we have underwater cables at all. I had be shown a map of existing cables before I believed it. http://www1.alcatel-lucent.com/submarine/refs/index.htm http://networks.cs.ucdavis.edu/~zhuk/maps/alcatel_large.gif
Perhaps the US government is limiting not only it's internal filtering system to Only 50 Gateways, but is out to channel the rest of the world through Echelons as well Inside Echelon
This whole Guam Cable thing is clearly a front. Everyone knows they're really using the Cable survey as an excuse to search for Japanese War Gold :)
Ok, I admit that everything I know about undersea cables I learnt from Neal Stephenson, but he was right about the undersea cable cutting war, wasn't he?
...my mighty fleet of wayward anchors.
Neal Stephenson's brilliant essay has lots of detail on submarine cable construction, including the "different types of cable installed in 'benign' and 'aggressive' seabed conditions" TFS considers unique to this blog.
Interesting, yes. Unique, no.
Or has that area been completely mapped and photographed?
Installing undersea cable: $188M
Getting some dodgy sea captain to snag it with an anchor: a couple of hundred and a case of Scotch.
Watching all the conspiracy loons on teh webz: priceless!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's probably going to cost over half a million dollars to stick network cable round our campus. And we're not even underwater.
Many Slashdot readers may remember Pipe Networks from their effort to build a data center in 60 days, which also used a blog and webcam to provide a window into the process.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
I think $188 million is a little extreme for a submarine cable network. Perhaps the Navy is having a hard time recruiting these days, and they are using cable TV as a perk for submariners. I still think the money could be better spent elsewhere - like for a mini-arcade in each sub.
Better known as 318230.
1/3 of jokes get modded OT. If you get the joke, mod 1 in 3 insightful/interesting/underrated to restore karma balance.
Guam has some connections at the moment, but this will be the biggest link to it by far - for now. "Google cable" Unity's southern loop will also pass through Guam and then the party really begins.
These are good times; today we have just over 1TB with Southern Cross and AJC combined. With 1TB Pipe/Unity cable, Telstra's 1TB cable to Hawaii and the upgrade of Souther Cross to 2TB all within the next year we will have a four-fold capacity increase.
It might be me, but I feel unlimited DSL accounts coming up later next year.
Now you can make your own $2mil underground cable system from home! (With 3 easy installments of $666,666. S&H not included)
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
How in the world does it only end up costing $2.72 a meter for a fiber run when I can't get a 600 ft run for less than $1000? Something seems a little out of whack here, I mean aren't submarine cables layered with kevlar and all the other good stuff that should raise the price a little bit?
There'll be no accusations, just friendly crustateans under the seeeeeeea!
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
You call that a pipe?! Now this http://www.pipeinternational.com/is a pipe!
Start with a $94M Submarine Cable System and use union labor!
*ducks*
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I remember diving Gun Beach when I was stationed in Guam. And there, smack dab in the middle of the dive site, went the underground cable. Pretty cool.
They show Tuckerton, NJ near the Va/NC border, and Manahawkin on Virginia's Eastern Shore.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Didn't you see this in your history classes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable
Don't be a dick. Even a typo dick. You'd start to be a lick. And nobody likes a lick.
Wait... DOH...
thanks for those pics, very cool.
it's surprising how many cables are needed, it looks kind of ridiculous. I guess they need a lot just for redundancy as well. It must be bloody expensive to build one of those long routes!
I assume the OADM (the branching points on this new cable) are OEO, in that they must convert light to Electricity, do all their routing, and then power transmitting lasers to continue down the appropriate output fiber. They didn't really mention how their OADM works, but if it's OEO it would require tons of power continuously, and I wonder how easy it is to run power along with the fiber bundles...
(hopefully it's really some sort of Calient-style mirror array, but who knows.)
... when they finish the section to Kinakuta.
Have gnu, will travel.
Laying a fat cable along the Trans Siberian Railway - which happens to have a southern leg down through Mongolia - shouldn't pose too much of a problem. You'd have to deal with Putin of course.
send + more == money?
Cables along the Trans-Siberian Railroad already exist since mid-90's, they are operated by Transtelecom: http://www.transtk.ru/www/nsf/netmap.nsf/eng!open
Probably, there's not much demand for Russian-Chinese traffic to justify peering between Transtelecom and some Chinese company.
I wonder if anyone had modeled a "grid" of solar-powered WAPs floating like bouys to cross ocean expanses? I know that 802.11 is not as fat a pipe as, well, an acutal pipe with fiber in it, but I'm curious about the analysis. Seems to me that it would be much cheaper to deploy / maintain bouys than undersea cable. And you could take failure of a few nodes if you deployed them in a grid (not just a line).
Perhaps there are legal restrictions I don't know about... I'm sure there's a LOT I don't know about this, but has this idea been considered?
...the technical term is "tube".
There's a whole series of them.
If you look at a map, there are three reasonable routes to connect Australia to civilization. Either you connect the western side of Aus up to Singapore, or you connect Sydney to sites north and east, and since Indonesia's in the way, if you want to go north, you go toward Guam; if you want to go east, you either stop in Hawaii or keep going to North America. Guam and Hawaii are both starting to get reasonable concentrations of cables stopping there, and Guam provides closer access to Asia than Hawaii does. The Singapore routes are pretty well covered, but it's a really long haul taking that approach to North America, especially if you're starting in Sydney or Melbourne.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yet another example of government waste! Hasn't anyone told them that submarines already have propellers and therefore don't need a cable system? Just think of the expense of building one of these from the US to North Korea or any other place we'd like to have our subs. One cable cut and the entire fleet would be out of action! I say we should stick with the current "self-propulsion" paradigm until they perfect the underwater slingshot.
Bring on the asteroid
they provide the same data (blog, progress) for the NZ-AU project
http://www.kordia.co.nz/node/1203
Do not click that link.