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

Dang! I was getting SUCH a good deal

[HawkinsD]

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

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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: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: 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