Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Repair Crews Reach Vicinity of Damaged Cables In Mediterranean

Posted by timothy on from the now-we-need-a-plucky-diver dept.

GWMAW writes "A robotic submarine searched beneath the Mediterranean on Sunday for damaged communications cables, two days after Web and telephone access was knocked out for much of the Middle East. Telecommunication providers from Cairo to Dubai continued Sunday to scramble to reroute voice and data traffic through potentially costly detours in Asia and North America after the lines running under the Mediterranean Sea were damaged Friday." According to the article, "Once found, the cable ends will be pulled to the surface and repaired on deck — a process that could take several days."

10 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. How do they do it? by tsa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How do they repair the cables? Especially with glass fibre I wouldn't know what to do.

    --

    -- Cheers!

    1. Re:How do they do it? by Aphoxema · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'm sure it's possible to cut off clean ends and put a replacement between, possible install a repeater in between. The beam already has to be extremely powerful to cross hundreds of miles, another cut shouldn't cause too much attenuation.

      I just hate to think what happens if this happens too many times, they'll have to lay a whole new cable.

      --
      "Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
    2. Re:How do they do it? by au3276f8ads7bfsad76s · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Better yet, how do they find where it's broken? I'm assuming you can't just 'ping' the broken end and get a distance measurement...

    3. Re:How do they do it? by davidsyes · · Score: 2, Interesting

      It would be interesting if they could build a cofferdam to house the bad ends and conduct repairs in it.

      Say each segment is some 300 feet long. One or more cofferdams of such length could be built and kept on stand-by. When a cable is damaged or cut in some way, the cofferdams (maybe similar to a submarine or coffin with hinges on one side so that the other open and close to admit the cable. The bad ends would be trimmed off and given new ends, and the cofferdam unlocked and flooded and dragged aside, or the cable dragged out from the opened cofferdam.

      Admittedly, the cofferdam might have to be as big as a small submarine (say, 33' in diameter) and include local power supply, air generation, and resting areas for the crew, as well as rapid escape gear. This thing might have to survive extreme depths of around 5,000 feet. But, it won't be rated for combat, shock, and so on, but any 1.5 to 1.9 survival factor (similar to USN submarines) might be good enough since the cofferdam would be towed and ballasted down to the rated working depting.

      Possibly even better might be a huge half-pipe that is massively heavy enough to semi-protect workers who are in advanced work suits. But, the nice thing about a mobile clamshell/decomissioned sub-like hull is the crew would be working at depth without suits, pressurized like sub crews, and avoid decompression routines.

      --
      Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
    4. Re:How do they do it? by IonOtter · · Score: 3, Interesting

      But nice work if you can do it.

      No it's not.

      I dunno how things work on cable ships for other countries, but working on the USNS Zeus sucks bigtime.

      No internet, no phones, no email, not even any outgoing traffic. NO electronic emissions of any kind. That also includes satellite TV because the dish does emanate some EMF. The only thing you can get is US Navy fleet broadcast coming in on UHF or EHF. You're gone for 3-4 months at a time, nobody onboard except for the captain knows where you're going or when you'll be back.

      The Zeus would drive a Tibetan Hermit insane.

      --
      [End Of Line]
    5. Re:How do they do it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Actually its 10,000 volts at .09 amps for a total of 900 Watts of power

  2. Slack by terraformer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There has to be a lot of slack for them to be able bring up both ends and not require massive amounts of force or cause stress on the ends. I wonder if they lay the cable not straight but in shallow s-turns back and forth to introduce slack into the system.

    --
    Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
  3. Conspiracy Theory by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If I was a certain US entity who is worried about more and more internet traffic avoiding the ol' USA, I'd "damage" a cable while using the outage as a cover to put a tap a few hundred miles away. If anything goes awry while tapping the cable, the obvious damage will be labeled as the cause.

    But that's just me.

  4. Re:Satellites FTW? by karmatic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yet another reason why we need a better satellite infrastructure. If everyone were using satellites, a reroute through Asia would be unnecessary.

    Except for the whole "240ms minimum latency" thing. Also, it's a lot easier to fix a malfunctioning cable than a malfunctioning satellite. Also, bad weather over the Satellite NOC can take out everyone's connection.

  5. Standard fare on good network testers by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I used to work at a network operations centre and we had testers that did all the kind of stuff. They'd tell you how long a cable was, what the loss was, if there was a break, info about the other end, etc, etc. Also could do layer 2 and 3 diagnostics. It was a real useful tool if a connection didn't work. Plug it in, see what looked out of place.