New Submarine Cable Planned Between SE Asia and US 121
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."
Different routes hardly "interesting" (Score:5, Interesting)
Neal Stephenson on "cable guys" (Score:4, Interesting)
a couple questions (Score:3, Interesting)
2. Why must such a link be terrestrial/oceanic? Why not use satellite links?
The US navy is ready! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:a couple questions (Score:1, Interesting)
The repair crews drag a giant hook (with a ship) near the break point and hope that they can cut the cable into two. The two ends of the cable will float up to the surface, and people replace that segment of the cable.
Does it sounds hideous? Yes. That's why it took 3 months to repair the Asia cable links.
What about the Pacific Ring of Fire? (Score:5, Interesting)
However, This [wikipedia.org] page, specifically this diagram [wikipedia.org] from Wikipedia, shows that there really isn't any way to avoid the so-called "Pacific Ring of Fire", as the PRF is essentially a nearly continuous series of oceanic trenches, island arcs, and volcanic mountain ranges and/or plate movements. And the countries to be connected - Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Hong Kong, the Philippines - sit neatly in this zone. So there really _isn't_ any mitigating natural disasters. Unless they're just talking about the type of tsunamis that recently hit the Indian Ocean areas.
As a side note, ninety percent of the world's earthquakes and 81% of the world's largest earthquakes occur along the Ring of Fire.
Re:Different routes hardly "interesting" (Score:5, Interesting)
You might not appreciate how hard it is to have redundant cable connections until you find yourself in a country with 7,000+ islands, separated from other countries between quite a lot of water.
Re:Pictures? (Score:5, Interesting)
Pretty much. They've been laying them for over a hundred years, so there's probably quite a few to stumble upon if you're ambling around the right areas. Some are more buried in the sand than others, but they're all pretty much sitting on the surface. In fact, to repair them, they drag a hook along the ocean floor until they snag, then they reel it in like a fish.
How do they know when it's touched bottom so they can move 100 feet forward and lay down some more?
Knowing the depth of the water and the amount they've spooled out gives them a pretty good idea of where it is.
Can they attach cameras and lights with batteries, wait for the thing to sink and then look around down there until the batteries die?
Probably. But generally the kind of kit you send down that far for science is the kind that you want to reel back in eventually.
If an aircraft carrier sunk in the middle of the Pacific and sunk 20,000 ft to the bottom could it crush the wires?
It takes much less than an aircraft carrier to sever such a cable. Anchors, fishing trawlers, and sharks have all been known to do the trick.
How thick is the thing when it's 20,000 feet down running up and down underwater mountains and valleys?
Not very thick at all. A few inches. Closure to shore it may be thicker, encased in more "armor", as there are more threats (as above: anchors, etc.) And no, it's unlikely you could dive down and splice in, for this reason, not to mention the more technical issues.
Could I go snorkeling someplace and see it when it comes up on shore? How to they protect it from terrorists with scuba gear?
Probably, somewhere. Some places it comes right up onto the beach, often surrounded by barbed-wire fences, then into a building where it's redirected underground. In other places, it's buried into the sea bed near shore and then goes underground to the terminal. Terrorist attack probably isn't that big a concern, as close to shore is the easiest and cheapest place to repair any damage.
Where do they "plug it in" when it comes up on shore? What do they plug into?
If you've seen one sturdy-looking telecom building, you've seen them all. Some might be built more like bomb shelters (or rather, as bomb shelters) than others, but for the most part, they're dull, short, windowless buildings. Inside the cable plugs into an expensive box with blinking lights connected to other boxes with blinking lights. Usually there's a telephone handset for talking to the guy on the other end.
Re:a couple questions (Score:4, Interesting)
There are a bunch of classified patents covering the mechanism(s) by which the US Navy splices into the transoceanic fiber runs. (IIRC, some company had been working on the technology a few years ago & the Feds classified all their work)
Re:a couple questions (Score:4, Interesting)
More details here [wikipedia.org]. They do a much better job at explaining this-
From the article:
To effect repairs on deep cables, the damaged portion is brought to the surface using a grapple. Deep cables must be cut at the seabed and each end separately brought to the surface, whereupon a new section is spliced in. The repaired cable is longer than the original, so the excess is deliberately laid in a 'U' shape on the sea-bed. A submersible can be used to repair cables that are near the surface.
Another link from Taipei Times [taipeitimes.com]-
The grapnel is a metal tool about 46cm by 61cm with a cutter like a fine razor blade and a grabbing tool. As tension increases and the cable is slowly pulled up, it is cut, grabbed, and half of it is hoisted to the surface. Dropping the grapnel, dragging the sea bed and recovering the cable can take about 16 hours, Walters said.
Re:a couple questions (Score:3, Interesting)
No. Satellites are line-of-sight, so you can theoretically have every satellite in the sky broadcasting across the entire GHz spectrum, and all of them will work just fine.
Satellites have limited bandwidth because of the expense of putting up a satellite, power requirements, equipment weight, etc. Satellites really have a lot of bandwidth, but it's not free.
Solar storms tend to shorten the life of satellites, but rarely just knock one out, unexpectedly.
And if you think it's easy to destroy a satellite in orbit, you should see how easy it is to cut a trans-oceanic cable.
The rest of the issues are latency, which is certainly a major concern. And you didn't mention on-going cost of operating satellites, vs a cable which generally just sits where you left it, and behaves itself.
In South-East Asia, it's *Extremely* interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
There are a *lot* of cables on that route. The December 2006 Taiwan quake took out N-1 or maybe N-2 of the cables there, and multiple segments of several of them. The cables had enough diversity to deal with problems like ship anchors and fishing nets; the earthquake trashed them all at once, and mostly in deep water. There weren't close to enough cable repair ships on that side of the world to fix them all at once, and weather delayed the repairs as well (plus repairs are a lot slower in deep water.) You can see some good maps at telegeography.com [nyud.net].
This cable sounds like a big big win. I haven't seen a map of the route yet, just press releases, but if it goes around the other side without going all the way down to Sydney, it'll not only cut a few tens of milliseconds off the route, and add a lot of (potential, if not necessarily actually lit up for a while) bandwidth, but it'll make a major difference to reliability. The Telekom Malaysia PR person said: "This low-risk route was designed to avoid the volatile and hazardous Pacific Ring, thus mitigating the effects from natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis."
Everything you wanted to know about (Score:3, Interesting)