Repair Crews Reach Vicinity of Damaged Cables In Mediterranean

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."

Comments

Re:Maybe this time ...

[pipboy9999]

... they will find Gilligan's Island and rescue the castaways.

And then whom ever owns the copy right to Gilligan's Island will misread the headline and sue them for using the under sea cable to download episodes of Gilligan's Island

Dang! I was getting SUCH a good deal

[HawkinsD]

Dang it! I was getting SUCH a good deal from the colocation facility in Yemen.

Wow

[papasui]

Stop pissing off Andrew Ryan.

Re:Wow

[Artuir]

Related to Jack Ryan by any chance? You know..

Perhaps they were shooting the Hunt for the Red October 2! It's typical of those guys to get a little carried away in their submarines, ripping through the ocean and all. Boys will be boys!

How do they do it?

[tsa]

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

Re:How do they do it?

[John Hasler]

> How do they repair the cables?

Superglue and duct tape.

Re:How do they do it?

[TheGratefulNet]

this is for UNDER WATER use.

therefore, its better left to DUCK tape.

(sorry....)

Re:How do they do it?

[internetcommie]

Superglue? Duct tape? Or maybe that magic stuff they use to make cracks in car windshields go away?

Re:How do they do it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, you don't have to do a thing. They already have people who do know what to do.

Re:How do they do it?

[Turiko]

Well, i guess they just cut off the 2 damaged parts, put a decent ender on it (like utp cables have a clip) and just put in another piece with 2 enders on them, and they put them together. The only problem is that that cable was never meant to be like that, and thus the protective layer around it is hard to break... at least when they try to repair it :D

Re:How do they do it?

[jellomizer]

That is why you are not doing it.

I am not an expert myself. However Glass does Melt, and can be fused back together, is a possibility, or the ends polished and put right next to each other... Perhaps there is a lot of Dark Fiber built into the cable to be bypassed. Humans made the technology, they probably know how to fix it.

Re:How do they do it?

[Yvan256]

Red Green to the rescue!

Re:How do they do it?

[pipboy9999]

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

My assumption would be that there are points built into the cable where you can exchange out bad segments for new segments.

Re:How do they do it?

[Aphoxema]

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.

Re:How do they do it?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.laser2000.co.uk/fusion_splicers.php?area=262

Re:How do they do it?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

http://www.francetelecom.com/sirius/dossiers_anim/cables_sous_marins/index_en.html

Re:How do they do it?

[au3276f8ads7bfsad76s]

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...

Re:How do they do it?

[AngelCeleste]

fiber splicers - its mostly done in the field because in house we have handy-dandy prespliced fiber cables of different lengths. If you see (fill in local ILEC) out repairing a cut cable, chances are they might be splicing.

Re:How do they do it?

[onkelonkel]

You had it right. OTDR.

Optical Time Domain Reflectometer. You just ping the broken end and get a distance measurement.

Re:How do they do it?

[nostrad]

You can, that's the good part about it, many times signals reflect when they hit an improperly terminated connection (impendance mismatch). This holds for both optical and electrical signals. Given the propagation time and speed, length is trivially calculated. There's special hardware to do this for you. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impedance_mismatch

Re:How do they do it?

[Octorian]

With a device known as an Optical Time Domain Reflectometer. Supposedly they can not only detect cable length, breaks, but even the location of splices.

Re:How do they do it?

[John Hasler]

Well you can, in a way. A pulse of light will be partially reflected from the broken end and the round-trip time measured. You should also be able to detect the last repeater in each half and so isolate the break to segment between the repeaters. There is also copper wire in the cable to power the repeaters and it should be possible to figure out how far the break in it is from the shore station by several methods.

IMHO the operators need to give more thought to reliability. They need more space diversity. The cables should be seperated, especially at landings and in shallow areas, and they should be plowed in in shallow areas. This would cost more money, though.

Re:How do they do it?

[rickb928]

The actual fiber repair is done pretty much as it would be done for terrestrial cables. Either a fusion splice, usually by re-cleaving the ends for a clean surface and vibrating the ends ultrasonically to heat by friction and weld them together, or a very small splicing kit that holds the ends in near-perfect alignment, usually filled with a gel of identical optical properties to reduce the loss and refraction. Since space is an issue, I suspect fusion splices are the only acceptable option.

The biggest problem is both accomodating the repairs to the fiber jackets, and then re-sealing the cable. I wouldn't be suprised that there are fairly standard splice boxes that solve this.

Replacing segments doesn't seem like a good option. Any useful segment should measure miles in length, which is pretty expensive. Even replacing a segment and hauling the old one in for repair sounds like more trouble than it's worth. Of course, repairs on the open sea sound like fun to me. I had enough trouble sitting at a little worktable in a dim cable room with equipment balanced here and there, and testing going on constantly. A nice 20-30 foot sea would make me want to apply at the local McDonald's. Life is too short.

But nice work if you can do it.

Re:How do they do it?

[c1t1z3nk41n3]

or just a new section. If you assume that most breaks in the cable occur in fairly localized areas due to increased environmental stresses, increased ship traffic or what have you then you may be able to replace a 50 mile section of cable with say 4 or 5 breaks in it and the new section would have 2 breaks. Of course that assumption may not play out though it seems reasonable to me. Also it would still be a stopgap as you would then see further breaks in that same section over time.

Re:How do they do it?

[davidsyes]

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.

Re:How do they do it?

[ubrgeek]

Why not drop an amplifier between the two parts? That way you're not syncing the cable to another piece of cable. Rather to a device in the middle?

Re:How do they do it?

[MBGMorden]

Luckily you can have both in one :)

http://duckproducts.com/products/detail.asp?catid=1&subid=1&plid=3

Re:How do they do it?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

They drag the cable up and cut it (assuming it is not already in two pieces). They strip back the armor and sheath on both pieces. They then splice in a new piece of cable using a fusion splicer, which basically lines up each individual fiber (quite a time-consuming process to clean and prep each piece) and then the fusion splicer essentially melts the fiber strand back together. They put heat-shrink and something like a splint to keep it from bending over the spliced area and then fit each splice into a tray. The trays are then mounted into a splice case. Submarine cables are much more difficult because it has to be well sealed and able to withstand significant pressure.

The faults are located using an OTDR (Optical Time Delay Reflectometry), which basically sends light down the fiber and measures the reflections. As we know the speed of light we can accurately measure the distance to a break, imperfections, etc of the cable and splices.

Re:How do they do it?

[ByOhTek]

how do you propose to power it?

I'm not saying power couldn't be supplied, but I don't think it'd be cost effective, and you'd need to run a whole new set of lines.

Re:How do they do it?

[aphexer]

They cut the cable in half, and put a new piece in it. They can locate the exact point of failure using an OTDR, as already mentioned in other comments by now.

In one such big under-sea cable, there could be hundreds of individual fibers inside. (It doesn't cost alot more to put another fibre in the big cable, and you get alot more bandwidth to sell).

For each fiber inside the cable they "weld" it to the new piece they are putting between. (I'm sorry, I don't have the correct translation for the word in English). But really, they put the fiber in a machine, together with the fiber of the new cable they are putting in between, and they hit a button: "weld". It creates an arc through the point where the fiber needs to be welded together. After the arcing you heat that spot so the atomic structure can repair a little.

Repeat 500 times and put some extra mechanical protection around to protect your welding, and you're done.

There exists equipment that can do multiple fibers at once, so basically the engineer who's doing it just needs to place both ends of the fibers in the machine, hit the button, remove fiber and repeat for a day or 2.

Re:How do they do it?

[ubrgeek]

I guess that's what a liberal-arts major gets for throwing a comment into a technical discussion: I hadn't even thought of that :)

Re:How do they do it?

[aphexer]

Indeed, any piece of fiber which isn't of very good quality will reflect part of the transmitted optical signal. By measuring these reflections with an OTDR like you said, you can pin-point the exact location of the damaged fiber. Even a splice of very good quality creates a little loss (about 0.10 dB), which you can measure.

Measurement with an OTDR is basically an optical radar. Send out an optical pulse and measure what comes back. Do some heavy math and you can plot signal loss vs cable length.

One hard part of this is that you need the exact refractive index of the glass you used (and you need several decimals...). This refractive index is used to calculate the distance the light has traveled before reflecting. If this index is just a bit off, then you're off hundreds of meters.

Re:How do they do it?

[AdamHaun]

Actually, you can. You use a device called a Time Domain Reflectometer, which sends a pulse down the line and times how long it takes a reflection to come back.

2 * Distance = Speed of light * Round trip time

To find the location of the fault to within ten feet you need a timer with about a 20 nanosecond resolution, which equates to a 50 MHz counter -- not too difficult.

Re:How do they do it?

[joeslugg]

I'm wondering about the "pulled to the surface and repaired on deck" part.

I imagine a cable laying on the sea floor going more or less "straight"
from A to B. Is there enough slack in the line to bring the broken
ends to the surface and hold them together?

(Clearly, the answer must be 'yes'. But I'm just wondering if anyone knows
more about it. Do they intentionally leave in some slack just for such a
reason when they lay a cable like this?)

Re:How do they do it?

[zymano]

lift it and then melt the fiber.

Re:How do they do it?

[Unique2]

When the BT engineer installed my companies fibre based connection, they did this, it's probably just as awesome but on a larger scale.

Re:How do they do it?

[tabrisnet]

Actually, there are repeaters in line, albeit I don't remember the distances. There's a big copper conductor in the jacket (just one, the ground is the ocean itself) sending a couple hundred volts through it.

Re:How do they do it?

[CODiNE]

Surely not! We all know here that ducks float.

Re:How do they do it?

[mpe]

Why not drop an amplifier between the two parts? That way you're not syncing the cable to another piece of cable. Rather to a device in the middle?

You'd still have to dismantle the cable and clean up the fibres anyway. An anchor is not going to make any kind of clean cut. So the task of splicing an any kind of repeater is going to be just as complex as joining the cable back together. Even before you consider the problem of powering that repeater.

Re:How do they do it?

[xSauronx]

new windshields? *confused*

Re:How do they do it?

[ColdWetDog]

I knew it! Sharks with Lasers! We don't need any stupid submarines.

Re:How do they do it?

[mpe]

I am not an expert myself. However Glass does Melt, and can be fused back together, is a possibility, or the ends polished and put right next to each other...

Stuck together with a glue having similar optical properties IIRC

Re:How do they do it?

[ColdWetDog]

(Clearly, the answer must be 'yes'. But I'm just wondering if anyone knows more about it. Do they intentionally leave in some slack just for such a reason when they lay a cable like this?)

If you think about it, given the long length of the cable compared to the depth of the ocean floor, you aren't adding much the total length of the run buy taking it to the surface. You could easily have some slack in the system to accommodate this. And of course, the cable is cut, so you might just add a new splice section to 'make up the slack' if needed. The couple of articles I found didn't really address your question, though.

Re:How do they do it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, I'll bite.

Optical fiber cables are connected by first identifying each strand in the bundle, and the other cut end of that same strand. Matching strands are taken, one set at a time, into a fusion splicing machine. The fusion splicing machine aligns the strands, then heats the ends so the glass melts together.

Older splicing machines required the person operating the machine to visually ensure the strands were aligned, and the heating was automatic. New machines perform computer-guided alignment and automatic heating. These machines commonly cost about as much as a nice new car (around $30-50 thousand U.S. dollars, IIRC) and require specialized training and supplies for regular, telephone-pole mounted cables. Undersea cables probably have extra special costs.

In any case, a bundle with hundreds of strands takes days to repair. It can take several hours to splice a broken 36 strand cable.

You can only get so many machines close enough to the broken cable, so the work does not allow for, say, 50 splicers to all work on it at once.

Of course, I'm glossing over all the work it takes to pull a cable off the sea floor, get it on a ship, and then put it back. Someone else can gather karma for that info ;)

Re:How do they do it?

[Sinus0idal]

Haha you joke, but I've actually opened a cabinet before to find a broken fibre taped up with a note on it saying 'inline splice, don't touch'. If you nudged it, the connection went down! Quality.

Re:How do they do it?

[zippthorne]

Not really that useful. A cofferdam will just slice the cable just outside the wall when you drive the steel elements into the seabed. Also, it'll take weeks or months to set up and break down, and doesn't work in water deeper than a few hundred feet, anyway.

Now you could use a caisson or dive bell to do the repairs, but then you have the issue of damaging workers' health in long saturation dives, and you have to spend long time getting guys up and down to the work site.

The best option is the one they do: hook both ends of the cable and drag them up to the tender, lock it in to your mobile clean room and take your time. It's just like your clamshell plan, except there's no risk of crimping the cable, and no need for a heavy pressure hull.

Re:How do they do it?

[lucifuge31337]

how do you propose to power it?

I'm not saying power couldn't be supplied, but I don't think it'd be cost effective, and you'd need to run a whole new set of lines.

The same way the repeaters are already powered - the are power leads bundled with the fiber cable. In a full cut, they would have to repair the copper power leads anyway.

Re:How do they do it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely not! We all know here that ducks float.

So we use witch tape?

Re:How do they do it?

[kimvette]

They use something called a "fusion splicer" to weld the fibres together.

Re:How do they do it?

[kimvette]

A typical rule of thumb is to bundle twice the number of fibers that you actually need. In an undersea cable, I wouldn't be surprised if they include four or even ten times what is needed to take occasional breaks and even future expansion into account. However, no amount of dark fiber will help when the whole bundle is severed by saboteurs^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hanchors.

Re:How do they do it?

[ByOhTek]

I didn't know they already did that.

Taking on the GP's reply to my post...

I guess that's what a Biological/Computer Science major gets for posting on an electrical/(civil?) engineering topic.

Re:How do they do it?

[AliasMarlowe]

Surely not! We all know here that ducks float.

Only if they weigh the same as a witch!

Re:How do they do it?

[geminidomino]

sure you can. google OTDR (Optical Time Domain Reflection). You get a fraction of a second value and multiply * speed of light in a fiber and voila, #feet to break.

Wouldn't that be "#meters to break?"

Re:How do they do it?

[SETY]

Fusion splices are the only acceptable option because you can't afford to have a 0.1 dB splice on a long fiber. Too much loss will upset your whole link budget and you will not get an acceptable SNR at the far end.

BTW, I have never read how a fusion splicer works, but all the ones I have used align the fiber and look like they send a current between two metal contacts for ~0.2 seconds that fuse the fiber. I'm pretty sure ultrasound isn't used. When you are trying to align two fibers exactly, vibrating them doesn't sound like a good idea.

Re:How do they do it?

[petermgreen]

that depends what units your reference for the speed of light in the fiber (note: speed of light in a fiber is considerablly slower than the speed of light in free space) is in.

Re:How do they do it?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not far from wrong actually. The superglue is optically identical in refraction index to the cable and the duct tape is a thermal shrink wrap designed to handle long term exposure to salt water. But that's essentially it. It take a long time to fix all those broken fibers.

 

Re:How do they do it?

[soundguy]

this is for UNDER WATER use.

therefore, its better left to DUCK tape.

(sorry....)

Wrong! They need to use FISH tape!

Re:How do they do it?

[sbeckstead]

I used to be a line supervisor for a company that built these things. Light travels a long distance in glass fiber and we would ping a 3 nanosecond pulse down the fiber and watch the reflections come back from the broken end of the fiber. When I left the company they were building a new one that used a 6 femtosecond pulse. You could find the break within a millimeter.

Re:How do they do it?

[internetcommie]

No, not new windshields. Cracked windshields.
If the crack is small, glass shops repair it. For this purpose they use something that starts out as a liquid and works like magic. The windshield appears to be as good as new afterwards.

But if used on cable it would probably just stick the strands together or something.

Re:How do they do it?

[IonOtter]

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.

Re:How do they do it?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:How do they do it?

[Anomalyst]

If you nudged it, the connection went down!

So, after a nudge, nudge you get a wink, wink? Does that make the cable a goer?

Re:How do they do it?

[petermgreen]

The things you describe sound like military paranoia. I imagine things would be better on civilian repair ships.

Re:How do they do it?

[shokk]

One of the benefits of being the country that originates 99% of the content on the internet - I don't have to worry about this.

Re:Maybe this time ...

[internetcommie]

In the age of the intarwebs undersea piracy has replaced piracy on the high seas!

Re:Maybe this time ...

[Yvan256]

I bet 10$ that it's Gilligan who cut the cables by accident.

MacGuyver uses a Swiss Army Knife, and this:

[PolygamousRanchKid]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter_(SSN-23)

and while you're at it

[binkleybloom]

stop using seal blubber for the dielectric!

OTDR

[Ellis D. Tripp]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_time_domain_reflectometer

Slack

[terraformer]

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.

Re: Slack

[Civil_Disobedient]

There was a terrific article written for Wired by Neal Stephenson (yes, that Neal Stephenson!) called Mother Earth Mother Board all about the laying of the longest underwater telephony cable in history. He goes into a lot of details as to how the cable is laid, what happens to the cable when it reaches shore, what is the cable made of, how does it work, etc.

Here's an excerpt where he explains how slack affects the process:

The basic problem of slack is akin to a famous question underlying the mathematical field of fractals: How long is the coastline of Great Britain? If I take a wall map of the isle and measure it with a ruler and multiply by the map's scale, I'll get one figure. If I do the same thing using a set of large-scale ordnance survey maps, I'll get a much higher figure because those maps will show zigs and zags in the coastline that are polished to straight lines on the wall map. But if I went all the way around the coast with a tape measure, I'd pick up even smaller variations and get an even larger number. If I did it with calipers, the number would be larger still. This process can be repeated more or less indefinitely, and so it is impossible to answer the original question straightforwardly. The length of the coastline of Great Britain must be defined in terms of fractal geometry.

A cross-section of the seafloor has the same property. The route between the landing station at Songkhla, Thailand, and the one at Lan Tao Island, Hong Kong, might have a certain length when measured on a map, say 2,500 kilometers. But if you attach a 2,500-kilometer cable to Songkhla and, wearing a diving suit, begin manually unrolling it across the seafloor, you will run out of cable before you reach the public beach at Tong Fuk. The reason is that the cable follows the bumpy topography of the seafloor, which ends up being a longer distance than it would be if the seafloor were mirror-flat.

Over long (intercontinental) distances, the difference averages out to about 1 percent, so you might need a 2,525-kilometer cable to go from Songkhla to Lan Tao. The extra 1 percent is slack, in the sense that if you grabbed the ends and pulled the cable infinitely tight (bar tight, as they say in the business), it would theoretically straighten out and you would have an extra 25 kilometers. This slack is ideally molded into the contour of the seafloor as tightly as a shadow, running straight and true along the surveyed course. As little slack as possible is employed, partly because cable costs a lot of money (for the FLAG cable, $16,000 to $28,000 per kilometer, depending on the amount of armoring) and partly because loose coils are just asking for trouble from trawlers and other hazards. In fact, there is so little slack (in the layperson's sense of the word) in a well-laid cable that it cannot be grappled and hauled to the surface without snapping it.

This raises two questions, one simple and one nauseatingly difficult and complex. First, how does one repair a cable if it's too tight to haul up?

The answer is that it must first be pulled slightly off the seafloor by a detrenching grapnel, which is a device, meant to be towed behind a ship, that rolls across the bottom of the ocean on two fat tractor tires. Centered between those tires is a stout, wicked-looking, C-shaped hook, curving forward at the bottom like a stinger. It carves its way through the muck and eventually gets under the cable and lifts it up and holds it steady just above the seafloor. At this point its tow rope is released and buoyed off.

The ship now deploys another towed device called a cutter, which, seen from above, is shaped like a manta ray. On the top and bottom surfaces it carries V-shaped blades. As the ship makes another pass over the detrenching grapnel, one of these blades catches the cable and severs it.

It is now possible to get hold of the cut ends, using other grapnels. A cable repair ship carries many d

Re: Slack

[exhilaration]

Terrific article indeed. Thanks for posting it.

Re: Slack

[ColdWetDog]

Oh, well. Since Neal's on the case, we can just go home and forget about doing random Google searches. But doing so finds that Cable and Marine systems seemingly has been bought out by Global Marine. Might be a fun place to work.

Re: Slack

[pi_rules]

I never knew laying cable could be so interesting.

Re: Slack

[keeboo]

Yeah... So much trouble for a cable getting laid.

Re: Slack

[commodoresloat]

I'm sorry, I'm sure that was a really useful explanation, but I'm stuck on one detail -- there's a public beach named Tong Fuk??!!

Conspiracy Theory

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Conspiracy Theory

[tchdab1]

Yes, the operant question for me in this story is "did we/the CIA cut the cable, did some other entity do it, or was it an accident?"
Not a whole lot of clues to go on so far.
And I wish I had some links to stories of various cable capers we (the USA) have been involved in before show those encountering this possibility for the first time.

Re:Conspiracy Theory

[afabbro]

Yes, the operant question for me in this story is "did we/the CIA cut the cable, did some other entity do it, or was it an accident?"

If that's what you're focusing on, then the operant question for you should be "is my tin foil thick enough?"

Re:Conspiracy Theory

[tsotha]

Yes, and your tap would show up on the Optical Time Domain Reflectometer other people have mentioned.

Re:Conspiracy Theory

[troll8901]

How would the tapping station transfer the data back to shore?

Satellites FTW?

[BiggoronSword]

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

Re:Satellites FTW?

[WPIDalamar]

~500ms Latency.

Re:Satellites FTW?

[Sethb]

Yes, but satellite internet pretty much kills any possibility of internet gaming, other than turn-based games. Wikipedia says it adds 500 to 900 miliseconds, which, erm, would suck.

Re:Satellites FTW?

[karmatic]

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.

Re:Satellites FTW?

[hardburn]

Geosychronous orbit has too much time latency, and LEO takes more satellites to cover the same area. It'd be cheeper to just lay more cable, but corporations tend to push for raw efficiency rather than redundancy. It's going to take governments using their buying power to encourage redundant routes to get us back to where DARPA was in the '80s.

Re:Satellites FTW?

[Matz0r]

My company has some servers located on Malta, we were down for about 8 hours before they could re-route the traffic. Ironically, we have better routing through Europe now than before the break.

Re:Satellites FTW?

[ChrisA90278]

People don't like satellite links. Some people don't like then so much that they will hang up and re-dial hoping to get routed over a cable next try. The reason is the delay. Light is fast but geo-sync is high. It's annoying to have a lag in the phone conversation so cables are always preferred.

Not necessarily a single point of failure.

[Tibor the Hun]

I don't think this is a single point of failure. Now, of course I didn't read the article, but according to this map of submarine communications cables, middle east has more than one cable reaching it.

Re:Not necessarily a single point of failure.

[hardburn]

Given the all the frantic rerouting going on, as well as the similar problems faced earlier this year, we should assume that it is, in fact, a central point of failure, no matter what an abstract overview map tells us.

Re:Not necessarily a single point of failure.

[FluffyWithTeeth]

And most of them are connected to the same city, where one ship can drag its anchor across all of them at once.

Re:Not necessarily a single point of failure.

[lysergic.acid]

then it might be worthwhile to invest in an underground tunnel or at least some kind of protective shielding under which the cables can sit. if it's a large network hub where 5-6 cables meet, then the cost of a little physical protection might be cheaper than the cost of losing huge segments of the network in addition to having to repair all those broken cables.

or, if the cables remain relatively stationary, you could install a radio beacon or GPS marker over the cable bundles so that large ships know not to set anchor there.

Re:Not necessarily a single point of failure.

[geminidomino]

then it might be worthwhile to invest in an underground tunnel or at least some kind of protective shielding under which the cables can sit.

I dunno. IANAE, but I can imagine that whatever would be strong enough to protect the cable from being torn up by an anchor big enough to hold a *battleship* in place, even if only applied to the "near-coast" parts of the cable, would cost more than redundant cable or even repairing cable (and probably would also require some as yet incomplete scientific breakthroughs. Adamantium, anyone?)

Re:Not necessarily a single point of failure.

[petermgreen]

The re-routing over the hours/days following the event is pretty much what would be expected given that theese are commercial links that companies have to pay to send thier data over.

Presumablly someone at each ISP has to do (perhaps only approximately and mentally) a cost-benifit analysis and decide that the cost of sending the data via an alternative route is worth the reputation saved by getting thier customers back online quickly.

Also afaict the middle east isn't the most politically stable of areas and therefore I wonder if a lack of land based cabling makes the problem worse.

Re:Not necessarily a single point of failure.

[lysergic.acid]

apparently your imagination is very lacking. if you put the cables underground, then there'd be nothing for the anchor to latch onto. likewise, if you build something similar to an extension cord cover over the cables, then they would be similarly protected. it doesn't have to be that strong. some kind of plastic or rubber that is saltwater-resistant would be fine.

no scientific breakthrough needed--just a little a common sense.

Re:Not necessarily a single point of failure.

[geminidomino]

Well, as I said, I'm not an engineer, so I don't know much about the feasibility of burying the cables under the ocean floor... but how would a rubber or plastic "cord runner" help? It's not heavy enough to stop it from being dragged by an anchor until the cable breaks, or likely strong enough to withstand having one dropped on it more than a few times...

Re:Not necessarily a single point of failure.

[lysergic.acid]

but how would a rubber or plastic "cord runner" help?

same way that an extension cord cover prevents you from tripping over a cord and ripping it out of the socket. if the cable is lying flat against the ground then there's nothing for the anchor to catch on.

and i highly doubt that there are very many undersea cables that are broken by anchors being dropped directly on top of them. usually when the cables are cut it's due to an anchor being dragged along the seabed by an oil tanker or other large ships. that's how you end up with multiple parallel-lying cables being broken at the same time.

Re:Maybe this time ...

[morgauo]

That's $10 for each of us right?

Gilligan Saved the Cable!

[camperdave]

Gilligan didn't cut the cable, the Professor did. He made a saw out of Mrs Howell's diamonds to try to cut through the outer sheath of the cable. When that didn't work, he rigged a blow torch to burn/melt his way through to the wires. All Gilligan did was cover up the hole with tree sap when the storm hit again. He *SAVED* the cable.

Re:Gilligan Saved the Cable!

[Lord Apathy]

I always wondered why didn't they just cut the fucking cable, tie it off, and wait for a repair ship to show up? But then again they where trapped on that island for 15 years and to god damn stupid to build a boat. The professor could pull a fusion reactor out of his ass but couldn't fix a god damn boat engine.

Re:Gilligan Saved the Cable!

[Wansu]

  Gilligan didn't cut the cable, ...

He gingerly buried it in Marianne's trench.

Re:Gilligan Saved the Cable!

[no1home]

I want a new choice when applying mod points: "Hmmm... Dirty" Then chose either +1 or -1, depending on application, tone, and general foulness. I'd give this a +1.

The summary has it...

[erroneus]

In the summary is enough information to show who has the most to gain from such an interruption and subsequent re-routing. If they are routing traffic through North America, it will be going through the NSA-snooped network. There are moments when I am not proud of America...

cables and eavesdropping

[BigHungryJoe]

I've got sources inside US intel that tell me these are botched attempts by Syrian intelligence to tap these undersea lines.

The chair is against the wall.

John has a long mustache. That is all.

Re:cables and eavesdropping

[Anonymous Coward]

The chair is against the wall.

What was Ballmer's role in all this?

Re:cables and eavesdropping

[Culture20]

Your code word checks out. You can un-anonymize yourself.

Re:cables and eavesdropping

[troll8901]

I've got sources inside US intel that tell me ...

And I thought that the only thing I need to fear are hidden codes in their CPUs.

Standard fare on good network testers

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Any ideas ...

[PPH]

... about who did it?

With OTDRs on-line ready to go on line at ech end of the cable, one should be able to locate the break within hours (if not minutes). Put that together with satellite recon photos and one should be able to track and identify ships in the area to narrow the search down.

Yeah, I know who runs the satellite networks. And it might not be in their best interest to identify one of their own ships. But I'm certain that the Russians would be more than happy to provide the needed data, just to see egg on the NSA's face.

If a sub cut it, it should actually be easier to identify. There are so few nations with this kind of capability and so many people watching them that they should be easy to spot. I'm sure Israel knows where every Syrian, Egyptian, etc. sub is in their end of the Med.

Sounds like fun

[mralphabet]

When doing a cabling job in Anchorage we cut into a data cable that was unmarked on our maps. We had a fun time splicing that, think it was 100+ pair cable. Sitting in a dirt ditch splicing wires is fun.

Re:How do they do it? Thx...

[davidsyes]

Doesn't help either that i forgot to mention a need for packing glands, sort of like in stern tubes for ships' propeller shafts. these could be air or oil-filled (environmental issues aside...regarding the oil) and inflated to seal out the water.

But, thanks for commenting.

An aside. I'm going to assume that some (pick your favorite) government attacked the cable, but in more than one place. The public, compromised area is the one we read about. The other, presumed undetected attack is where a tap was placed. Some kind of tap many geeks here would claim doesn't or cannot exist. But, i say, "Never say never". People these days get paid very big (or maybe not very big) money to circumvent others' communication systems, sorta the inverse of that ex-Radioman named Walker, who compromised the KW-7 crypto keying secrets for a measely sum.

Huh?

[GuloGulo]

"There are moments when I am not proud of America..."

What does America have to do with you being a paranoid whackjob?

Re:Huh?

[erroneus]

What part of the illegal NSA wire-tapping program did you miss over the course of this entire year?? And just because it has been exposed does not mean it has stopped! It is STILL RUNNING.

Re:Huh?

[GuloGulo]

"What part of the NSA wire-tapping program did you miss over the course of this entire year??"

FYP, didn't miss it, still no explanation why America has anything to do with you being a paranoid nutball.

Re:How do they do it? Thx...

[oasisbob]

Some kind of tap many geeks here would claim doesn't or cannot exist

To the contrary, the existance of submarine taps are very well established.

Re:Maybe this time ...

[MJMullinII]

Fire the ADMINISTRATOR!