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How To Build a $188M Submarine Cable System

Posted by kdawson on from the follow-along-at-home dept.

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."

8 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. Wow by Kamineko · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

    1. Re:Wow by vidarh · · Score: 4, Insightful
      The interesting thing is that while laying underwater cable is pretty costly, for long legs it's very competitive compared to land based cable systems. Europe's connections to South East Asia for example are abysmal. From the UK at least huge chunks of the traffic end up routed the "long way round" over the Atlantic to the US, over land to the west coast and then over the pacific. Trust me when I say that ssh over a connection that takes the long way around from London to Beijing is no fun.

      Part of it is of course that for underwater cables you don't have to deal with pesky roads and buildings that people don't appreciate you laying cables over, and digging cable trenches cutting through built up areas is extremely expensive.

    2. Re:Wow by nacnud75 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Think that is amazing, check out this map of undersea cables, from 1901!

    3. Re:Wow by evanbd · · Score: 4, Funny

      Wireless is really really sucky for huge numbers bits.

      No kidding. I tried to send a 2 over a wireless network once, and it came out looking all distorted. Ever since, it's been all Cat5 for me. When I need to send a high-valued bit, it just works better.

  2. Re:Why Guam? by stryyker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Perhaps so they can have lower cost bandwidth to the rest of the world and connect to other carriers at Guam?

  3. An obvious ruse by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    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?

  4. Re:Why Guam? by mattMad · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  5. What a silly idea by pocketfuzz · · Score: 4, Funny

    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