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."

Comments

Re:Wow

[CRCulver]

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.

Undersea cables were a big deal among nerds about a decade ago when Blind Man's Bluff came out. The military was doing amazing whizbang things with tapping underseas cables, but they obviously couldn't let anyone know about it at the time and it took decades for the stories to come out. The subsequent preparation of the U.S.S. Jimmy Carter to tap fiber-optic cables got quite a bit of coverage in the news.

Re:Why Guam?

[mattMad]

Why would Australia, already with very limited high cost bandwidth to the rest of the world, bother building out cable to the small remote isolated island of Guam? If you look at this map http://www1.alcatel-lucent.com/submarine/refs/Asian_Map_LR.pdf that a previous poster linked to you will see that Guam is already quite well connected (both to Asian countries and to the US) - so connecting Australia to Guam gives much more benefits than just being connected to Guam.

PIPE did the 60-Day Data Center

[miller60]

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.