New Submarine Cable Planned Between SE Asia and US

el_flynn writes "BusinessWeek is reporting on a new submarine cable system that will link South East Asia directly with the USA. Designated Asia-America Gateway (AAG), the project will involve a consortium of 17 international telcos, including AT&T Inc, India's Bharti AirTel, BT Global Network Services, CAT Telekom (Thailand), Eastern Telecommunications Philippines Inc (Philippines), Indosat (Indonesia) and Pacific Communications Pte Ltd (Cambodia). Led by Telekom Malaysia Berhad, the project is slated for completion in 2008, where 20,000km of cables will be providing a capacity of up to 1.92 Terabits per second of data bandwidth. Interestingly, the fibre-optic cable system will be taking a different route from many existing cables to avoid quake-prone areas and a repeat of the disruption to Asian web access caused by a tremor off Taiwan four months ago."

Re:a couple questions

[Maxo-Texas]

Satellites == restricted bandwidth since it has to go by some frequency on the radio band.
Satellites == susceptible to solar storms, debris, and (soon) attack from ground/air based lasers and high inertia weapons.
Satellites == poor TCP performance (doesn't mean you could not use another format of course:http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/470799.html).
Satellite == "High Bandwidth" is in gigabytes per second (not Tbits). So you would need a lot of them. Latency is 400ms. That's pretty high.
Satellite == roughly 80,000 miles via satellite vs roughly 12,000 via cable.

Re:a couple questions

[Tallweirdo]

1. How does one find/fix breakages in 20,000 km of cable? How would this be not much worse than repairing the trans-Atlantic cables, from a cost-benefit view?

As these are Fibre Optic cables it is quite simple to locate breakages using a device known as an Optical Time Domain Reflectometer (OTDR) [wikipedia.org]. You send an optical pulse down the cable and measure to see if you get reflections. If there is a break in the cable the laser will reflect off the discontinuity. The time taken for the reflection to return will give you the distance between the test point and the break as the speed of light in the cable is a known quantity.

If you then want to fix the cable you need to get to it and splice the broken fibre(s) back together. AFAIK this is done by hooking the fibre optic cable from a boat and hauling it to the surface (there is quite a bit of slack in the cables and they are well armoured) you then locate the fault and repair the break.

This isn't a replacement for the Trans-Atlantic cables, this is a redundant route so that people in South-East Asia and Australasia have an alternate route for getting traffic to the US when the cables that pass through Japan and/or Taiwan are damaged.

Re:a couple questions

[Anonymous Coward]

> 1. How does one find/fix breakages in 20,000 km of cable?

You drag a plow along the ocean floor until it snags the cable, you gently bring it to the surface, then you repair it on your cable repair ship: http://www.fas.org/irp/program/collect/t-arc.htm [fas.org]

Re:a couple questions

[slashdotmsiriv]

" Satellites == poor TCP performance (doesn't mean you could not use another format of course:http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/470799.html " http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/470799.html [psu.edu], File not Found Did you mean to cite "Congestion Control for High Bandwidth-Delay Product Networks" XCP : http://www.sigcomm.org/sigcomm2002/papers/xcp.pdf [sigcomm.org] ?

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Re:a couple questions

[kestasjk]

This isn't a replacement for the Trans-Atlantic cables, this is a redundant route so that people in South-East Asia and Australasia have an alternate route for getting traffic to the US when the cables that pass through Japan and/or Taiwan are damaged.

My connection (on the Agile network) travels directly from Sydney to San Jose, CA. To benefit from this it sounds like my connection would have to travel up to Japan, and currently my route to Japan runs through America. I'm not sure if Australia will benefit from this.