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Networking Entertainment

How To Build a $188M Submarine Cable System 87

Posted by kdawson from the follow-along-at-home dept.
Bevan Slattery writes "PIPE Networks has launched a blog and an online progress report on the construction of its $188M (AU$200M), 6,900-km submarine cable system connecting Sydney (Australia) to Piti (Guam). People can follow the many tasks required to construct a submarine cable and track the project's progress. The daily blog provides unique insight into PPC-1's construction, including for example the different types of cable installed in 'benign' and 'aggressive' seabed conditions."
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How To Build a $188M Submarine Cable System More

How To Build a $188M Submarine Cable System

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  • Wow (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kamineko ( 851857 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2008 @06:18AM (#23156106)
    Fascinating stuff. I'm still amazed that we have underwater cables at all. I had be shown a map of existing cables before I believed it. http://www1.alcatel-lucent.com/submarine/refs/index.htm [alcatel-lucent.com] http://networks.cs.ucdavis.edu/~zhuk/maps/alcatel_large.gif [ucdavis.edu]

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by daveb ( 4522 )
      how did you think the bits moved through the tubes - wirelessly? Wireless is really really sucky for huge numbers bits. I am pretty sure that the vast majority of core internet traffic is cable based
      • It sounds stupid, but I honestly had no idea. Logically, I knew that it had to be wires, but wires under the sea? That's super amazing-bonkers!

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by Missing_dc ( 1074809 )
          but Darling it's better, down where its wetter, take it from meeeeeee!!

        • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          They've only been using undersea cables for communications since the 1850s [wikipedia.org]. The first trans-Alantic cable was layed in 1857-58 [atlantic-cable.com], but it was only in operation for a month (the tech wasn't up to snuff yet). It was in 1865-66 that the first successful trans-Atlantic cable was laid. Good grief!
        • Yes, and this kind of basic ignorance is one of the things that is so frighteningly wrong with the world today.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by daveb ( 4522 )
          what's truly amazing is how it's done. Remarkable stuff.

          But it is stunning to think that all contenents and most decent sized islands are tied together with copper and glass cable

      • Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)

        by evanbd ( 210358 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2008 @08:11AM (#23156578)

        Wireless is really really sucky for huge numbers bits.

        No kidding. I tried to send a 2 over a wireless network once, and it came out looking all distorted. Ever since, it's been all Cat5 for me. When I need to send a high-valued bit, it just works better.

      • I knew we (I'm in the US) had a domestic cable network but to get over the ocean I figured we used satellites.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by bigdaisy ( 30400 )
      Welcome to the middle of the 19th century! If you think putting cables under water is exciting, wait until you hear about the "light bulb", the "phonograph" and "chewing gum". You'll probably wet your woolens.
      • I send my messages (including this one) by messenger on horseback. For transatlantic messages, I except them to supply their own rowing boat.

    • Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)

      by vidarh ( 309115 ) <vidar@hokstad.com> on Tuesday April 22, 2008 @07:27AM (#23156380) Homepage Journal
      The interesting thing is that while laying underwater cable is pretty costly, for long legs it's very competitive compared to land based cable systems. Europe's connections to South East Asia for example are abysmal. From the UK at least huge chunks of the traffic end up routed the "long way round" over the Atlantic to the US, over land to the west coast and then over the pacific. Trust me when I say that ssh over a connection that takes the long way around from London to Beijing is no fun.

      Part of it is of course that for underwater cables you don't have to deal with pesky roads and buildings that people don't appreciate you laying cables over, and digging cable trenches cutting through built up areas is extremely expensive.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by xaxa ( 988988 )
        The countries the cables would have to pass through to go from Europe to South-East Asia aren't very (politically) stable. I've read that this is more of a problem than the undersea cables.
      • Laying a fat cable along the Trans Siberian Railway - which happens to have a southern leg down through Mongolia - shouldn't pose too much of a problem. You'd have to deal with Putin of course.

    • Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)

      by nacnud75 ( 963443 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2008 @07:39AM (#23156432)
      Think that is amazing, check out this map [atlantic-cable.com] of undersea cables, from 1901!

      • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        And check this [atlantic-cable.com] one out, too. Ahh, the good old times we had in British America.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ashitaka ( 27544 )
        I had to do some Wikipedia research before I believed that was a true map. Considering the first successful transatlantic cable was only achieved in 1866 a lot of cable-laying was done in successive years.

        The lines to Hawaii is projected as it only came online in 1902.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by SickHumour ( 928514 )
      Those pictures remind me of our network cabinets at the office. Do they also have issues with the cables being tangled or mislabeled?
      • Do they also have issues with the cables being tangled or mislabeled?


        You mean like this [earthlink.net] and this [earthlink.net]?

        No, what would make you think there is a problem with cables being tangled or mislabeled?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Yvanhoe ( 564877 )
      I'll take the occasion to ask if someone has a readable version of this map and also if someone knows its history ? is it only Alcatel's cable system or is it a complete map ? Does someone have a complete map ?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Yvanhoe ( 564877 )
        Ok, mod me down, I hadn't check the first link. Thanks !
        Apparently this is a complete map. Somehow I thought the network would be denser...
    • You call that a pipe?! Now this http://www.pipeinternational.com/ [pipeinternational.com]is a pipe!
      • Actually, no. Technology was never mentioned in my history classes at school. I'm not joking. Maybe if I were made aware of stuff like this, History classes would have been a lot more interesting to me.

        (Actually there was something about detecting cholera with something or other mentioned once, but I was ten years old at the time).

        • Fascinating. I mean, it's fascinating that it wasn't there--I always think of it as being one of those things there's a paragraph or two on in the popular 8th grade american history texts. (Although the wikipedia article is much more detailed.)

          Anyway, isn't this stuff fun? =)
    • thanks for those pics, very cool.

      it's surprising how many cables are needed, it looks kind of ridiculous. I guess they need a lot just for redundancy as well. It must be bloody expensive to build one of those long routes!

      I assume the OADM (the branching points on this new cable) are OEO, in that they must convert light to Electricity, do all their routing, and then power transmitting lasers to continue down the appropriate output fiber. They didn't really mention how their OADM works, but if it's OEO

  • Why Guam? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by FriendlyLurker ( 50431 )
    Why would Australia, already with very limited high cost bandwidth to the rest of the world, bother building out cable to the small remote isolated island of Guam?
    Perhaps the US government is limiting not only it's internal filtering system to Only 50 Gateways [slashdot.org], but is out to channel the rest of the world through Echelons as well

    Further information published by the US Air Force identifies the US Naval Security Group Station at Sabana Seca, Puerto Rico as a COMSAT interception site. Its mission is "to becom

    • Re:Why Guam? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by stryyker ( 573921 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2008 @06:36AM (#23156182)
      Perhaps so they can have lower cost bandwidth to the rest of the world and connect to other carriers at Guam?

    • Re:Why Guam? (Score:5, Informative)

      by mattMad ( 1271832 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2008 @07:08AM (#23156290)

      Why would Australia, already with very limited high cost bandwidth to the rest of the world, bother building out cable to the small remote isolated island of Guam?
      If you look at this map http://www1.alcatel-lucent.com/submarine/refs/Asian_Map_LR.pdf [alcatel-lucent.com] that a previous poster linked to you will see that Guam is already quite well connected (both to Asian countries and to the US) - so connecting Australia to Guam gives much more benefits than just being connected to Guam.
      • Guam has some connections at the moment, but this will be the biggest link to it by far - for now. "Google cable" Unity's southern loop will also pass through Guam and then the party really begins.

        These are good times; today we have just over 1TB with Southern Cross and AJC combined. With 1TB Pipe/Unity cable, Telstra's 1TB cable to Hawaii and the upgrade of Souther Cross to 2TB all within the next year we will have a four-fold capacity increase.

        It might be me, but I feel unlimited DSL accounts coming up la

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bushcat ( 615449 )

      Why...building out...to... Guam?
      because Guam isn't remote bit-wise. You can connect there to GP. TPC-5, TGN, AJC and others I can't remember. It's also a relatively flat run.
       

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Mike89 ( 1006497 )

      Why would Australia, already with very limited high cost bandwidth to the rest of the world, bother building out cable to the small remote isolated island of Guam?

      From one of the original press releases [whirlpool.net.au] back in December 2006 (Whirlpool is an Australian broadband news site/forum).

      The link would connect Australia to what VSNL claims is the "world's largest designed global backbone capacity network, spanning across 4 continents and comprises of major ownership in 206,356km of terrestrial network fibreoptic n

      • If you look at a map, there are three reasonable routes to connect Australia to civilization. Either you connect the western side of Aus up to Singapore, or you connect Sydney to sites north and east, and since Indonesia's in the way, if you want to go north, you go toward Guam; if you want to go east, you either stop in Hawaii or keep going to North America. Guam and Hawaii are both starting to get reasonable concentrations of cables stopping there, and Guam provides closer access to Asia than Hawaii doe

  • An obvious ruse (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 22, 2008 @06:40AM (#23156194)
    This whole Guam Cable thing is clearly a front. Everyone knows they're really using the Cable survey as an excuse to search for Japanese War Gold :)

    Ok, I admit that everything I know about undersea cables I learnt from Neal Stephenson, but he was right about the undersea cable cutting war, wasn't he?
  • Neal Stephenson's brilliant essay [wired.com] has lots of detail on submarine cable construction, including the "different types of cable installed in 'benign' and 'aggressive' seabed conditions" TFS considers unique to this blog.

    Interesting, yes. Unique, no.

  • Histroy uncovered? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by iamsamed ( 1276082 )
    How many of you saw the article and the photo and hope that the undersea survey produces more pictures of sunken WWII stuff?

    Or has that area been completely mapped and photographed?

    • Only the areas very close to shore will be mapped to that level of detail - so the odds are that nothing important or impressive will be found.

  • Ob (Score:3, Funny)

    by Hognoxious ( 631665 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2008 @07:40AM (#23156438) Homepage Journal
    Installing undersea cable: $188M

    Getting some dodgy sea captain to snag it with an anchor: a couple of hundred and a case of Scotch.

    Watching all the conspiracy loons on teh webz: priceless!

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Installing undersea cable: $188M

      Getting some dodgy sea captain to snag it with an anchor: a couple of hundred and a case of Scotch.

      Watching all the conspiracy loons on teh webz: priceless!
      So I was right all along! The undersea cable cutting is a conspiracy led by MasterCard! It's all becoming cle...
  • It's probably going to cost over half a million dollars to stick network cable round our campus. And we're not even underwater.

  • PIPE did the 60-Day Data Center (Score:3, Informative)

    by miller60 ( 554835 ) * on Tuesday April 22, 2008 @07:55AM (#23156500) Homepage
    Many Slashdot readers may remember Pipe Networks from their effort to build a data center in 60 days [slashdot.org], which also used a blog and webcam to provide a window into the process.
  • I think $188 million is a little extreme for a submarine cable network. Perhaps the Navy is having a hard time recruiting these days, and they are using cable TV as a perk for submariners. I still think the money could be better spent elsewhere - like for a mini-arcade in each sub.

    • I think $188 million is a little extreme for a submarine cable network. Perhaps the Navy is having a hard time recruiting these days, and they are using cable TV as a perk for submariners. I still think the money could be better spent elsewhere - like for a mini-arcade in each sub.
      But think of the bandwidth they can get with cable broadband! Much better than that ultra long wave towed cable telegraph thing.
  • Now you can make your own $2mil underground cable system from home! (With 3 easy installments of $666,666. S&H not included)
  • How in the world does it only end up costing $2.72 a meter for a fiber run when I can't get a 600 ft run for less than $1000? Something seems a little out of whack here, I mean aren't submarine cables layered with kevlar and all the other good stuff that should raise the price a little bit?
  • Start with a $94M Submarine Cable System and use union labor!

    *ducks*
  • They show [alcatel-lucent.com] Tuckerton, NJ near the Va/NC border, and Manahawkin on Virginia's Eastern Shore.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Skater ( 41976 )
      Never mind that, did you see the size of that maintenance vessel??
    • Additionally, they spell Mazatlán "Mazatian", Cancún as "Cancuún", and Tulum as "Tulun". It's as if they OCR'ed a map.
  • ... when they finish the section to Kinakuta [wikipedia.org].

  • What a silly idea (Score:4, Funny)

    by pocketfuzz ( 517969 ) on Tuesday April 22, 2008 @04:43PM (#23163458)
    Yet another example of government waste! Hasn't anyone told them that submarines already have propellers and therefore don't need a cable system? Just think of the expense of building one of these from the US to North Korea or any other place we'd like to have our subs. One cable cut and the entire fleet would be out of action! I say we should stick with the current "self-propulsion" paradigm until they perfect the underwater slingshot.
  • they provide the same data (blog, progress) for the NZ-AU project

    http://www.kordia.co.nz/node/1203 [kordia.co.nz]

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