Slashdot Mirror
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.
These are the Scottish islands we're talking about; where the weather can get so bad that even radio stays indoors.
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
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!
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