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UK Completes 250km of Undersea Broadband Rollouts
DW100 writes The UK has completed a highly challenging rollout of broadband to remote islands in Scotland, covering 250km of seabed. The work has taken many months but will mean some 150,000 residents in the islands will be able to get broadband of up to 80Mbps. A cable laying ship, the Rene Descartes, carried out the work, with the longest cable stretching 50 miles between islands.
Brought t you by... GCHQ! It only takes a price mark-up of 100%, but hey, you've got a total backup of your data!
...and let's not start on mixing scales here... km to miles? Do I have to do EVERYTHING? Divide by 1.609.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
These are the Scottish islands we're talking about; where the weather can get so bad that even radio stays indoors.
Now a very quick way to find out: What's the story at Balamory?
.. Wouldn't you like yo know?
You know what also happens a heck of a lot up there? Storms. And you know what storms can do? Degrade radio transmissions significantly.
And why would submarines be colliding with cables laid on the sea bed? That would require submarines to be dragging themselves across the sea bed - which they don't normally do...
These are the Scottish islands we're talking about; where the weather can get so bad that even radio stays indoors.
I hear that they are going top relay it to the more remote residents via bagpipes. The whole thing will use Scotland's major sustainable energy source, the virtually limitless supply of hot air from Alex Salmond
It's also potentially much faster than any cable-based system
Wat?
Cable-based communication is potentially much faster than any radio based communication. Each signal pair in a cable can carry as much information that you can transfer over radio.
clearly, you have no idea what the German Navy's capable of.
Ask Norway.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Wouldn't you need a 500m tall tower for LoS comms with an island 80km away? Good luck keeping that standing in an Atlantic gale.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
There's no cable at Scapa Flow for this rollout. If you're worried about submarines, I'd be concerned about the cables around Arran and Bute, that's on the way to the submarine base at Faslane. Not that submarines tend to drag themselves along the bottom often enough to worry about the cables.
Radio is slow compared to fibre, it's prone to disruptions from weather and EMI, and, it's actually quite expensive too, in a situation like this.
So now even remote scottish islanders have better internet than most of the US.
When will the US realize they have to regulate their internet market?
Will it be when Africa passes them in average internet connection?(every other populated continent has)
Will it be when other nations start to apply diplomatic pressure because they are slowing down the world as a whole?
Will it be when they end up as the nation in the world with the worst internet connection?
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
It's also potentially much faster than any cable-based system
Wat?
Cable-based communication is potentially much faster than any radio based communication. Each signal pair in a cable can carry as much information that you can transfer over radio.
Station wagon full of LTO tapes, anyone?
Depends on what you mean by fast. The speed of light through air is quite a bit faster than through optical fiber or copper, thus yielding lower latency over distances. It's such a difference that the path from New York City to Chicago is now traversed by microwave/laser towers for financial institutions, in order to save a few milliseconds on the round trip and thus yield faster (read: more profitable) trades between the commodities market hub (in Chicago) and the securities market hub (in NYC).
Umm, no.
The faster the connection the more bandwidth is needed. I suppose that technically there is more bandwidth available in all of the radio spectrum than you are likely to get through one cable. However.. radio has to be shared with every other radio user out there in the world. You don't get to use ALL of the available bandwidth available in the open air for just one thing. You pay some government regulator a ton of money and then you get a channel, a little slice of that bandwidth which you can use. Otherwise we would all try to have our own personal wireless broadband, immediately run out of bandwidth and nothing would work through the interference!
You do get to use all of the bandwidth available in a cable though and if it's a half-way decent cable that is a LOT. And.. if that isn't enough you can run another cable and use all of that bandwidth too.
Occasionaly we might see a situation where a typical wireless link than a wired one. If that happens it is only because money and time have recently been poured into developing modulation methods and protocols to more efficiently use bandwidth and it has been applied to the wireless connection first. When these new discoveries are applied to wired connections it all evens out and the wire is faster again.
uh, that's what spread spectrum's for.
Thank Hedy Lamarr for that.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
That's HEDLEY!
So in UK, do mobile carriers like Vodafone offer unlimited data plans? Or conversely, do none of the broadband providers there provide unlimited data plans? This is only extravagant if people in Orkney & Shetland were getting uncapped data from the carriers. Is that the case here?
one word - bandwidth
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
New expensive hallow fiber is about 99.5%c, while regular fiber is about 65%c. I'll be happy with regular fiber for now, but once I get 1gb Internet on the cheap, the next upgrade will be hallow fiber trunks for low latency gaming. Regular fiber for the last mile will be fine.
Do you mean "hollow"?
Hallow fiber is what you'll have when the Vatican gets into the ISP business.
Radio is no use. You'd need to be on VHF at least in order to get the bandwidth for the speed and VHF and higher is line of sight. You'd need fooking tall towers at either end to overcome the curvature of the earth for that kind of distance between the UK and the islands. Not only that, it can be easily interrupted by both man made and naturally occurring sources.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Also, it's much easier to drive all traffic through a few cables where they can be easily tapped by GCHQ.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
There's this thing called RADIO, invented by a rather clever chap called MARCONI. It allows untethered communication between two points. It doesn't, therefore, rely on cables. It's also potentially much faster than any cable-based system and not prone to submarines colliding with it. Which happens a LOT up Scapa way.
Uhh. While it is true that radio has an edge when it comes to propagation delay compared to fibre, it's not enough to bother any but the staunchest algorithmic trader. When it comes to bandwidth it's not even close, the fibre wins by so much it's not even funny, and that's comparing to microwave, i.e. line of sight radio links, which are difficult to span large stretches of water with, being line of sight. Also since sea water is conductive you have a dickens of a time to deal with all the reflections and other potential signal degradation.
If you want to communicate via radio and it's not line of sight, then the only viable option if you're going to have any kind of bandwidth is satellite. That's both slower and suffers from a much longer delay. Any other radio is going to be much lower frequency (to follow the earth's curvature), and hence severely bandwidth limited.
P.S. Submarines will not cut cables laying on the bottom of the ocean if that's not specifically in their orders to do so. They a) don't spend much time dragging along the ocean floor, and b) have much better charts than you and I (since they also cover military cables and installations) so, that's be the very least of your worries.
Stefan Axelsson
250 km of seabed, with 50 miles between islands...i suppose consistency of units would be a lot to ask for...
I am not a number - I am a free man!
Right, as if that's any harder with a radiolink... Quite a stupid statement
For the prices you pay, they have been blessed :-)
There's this thing called RADIO, invented by a rather clever chap called MARCONI. It allows untethered communication between two points. It doesn't, therefore, rely on cables. It's also potentially much faster than any cable-based system and not prone to submarines colliding with it. Which happens a LOT up Scapa way.
Sounds like those sub captains need more training... The sub should never touch the floor.
Yeah, but what securities trader worth their salt is going to be on a Scottish island more than 50 miles from anywhere instead of in London?
I guess this undersea broadband deployment means that a certain sea sponge who lives in a pineapple under the sea can finally get broadband!
I wonder if this means that the Krusty Krab will start offering free Wi-Fi?
Or 125m towers on each side. That's a bit more doable. But... then there's a chance an Islander will climb Satan's ladder and glimpse the beguiling lights of civilisation. Won't end well.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
that's "Hedy", actually. As in Hedwig Eva Maria Lamarr.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Hutchison 3G ("Three UK") offer unlimited data on their pay as you go and basic voice contract packages.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel