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Communications Networking Technology

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."
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New Submarine Cable Planned Between SE Asia and US

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  • by EmbeddedJanitor ( 597831 ) on Sunday April 29, 2007 @11:11PM (#18923857)
    Well duh! Taking a different route gives redundancy in the case of natural disaster/ deliberate attack clobbering one line. That's pretty common practice for laying cables, power lines, microwave links etc. It has been done for years.
    • by psaunders ( 1069392 ) on Sunday April 29, 2007 @11:41PM (#18924001)
      But let's not forget, it's about improving speed as well as reliability. With this high-bandwidth cable, it will take users in SE Asia much less time to download submarines from the US.
    • by bangenge ( 514660 ) on Monday April 30, 2007 @12:58AM (#18924361)
      Well if anything, it gives us less worries in the event of a catastrophe. Back when the Taiwan earthquake happened, Internet connections here in the Philippines were pretty much useless for a couple of days. It pretty much showed how dependent _I_ am to the internet (I can only speak for myself, but I guess this was a common feeling for most people). It was pretty frustrating to say the least. I don't know about the other countries (Malaysia, Thailand, etc), but we were hit pretty hard back then. I'm pretty much welcome to adding more connections, to say the least. If anything, it might eventually help improve the bandwidth/cost ratio.

      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.
    • by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Monday April 30, 2007 @03:45AM (#18925123) Journal
      If you look at a map of the undersea cable routes between South-East Asia and the US, or South-East Asia and North-East Asia, where "South-East Asia" includes the big markets of Hong Kong, Southern Taiwan, Guangzhou, Singapore, and traffic from India that routes through Singapore or HK, as well as smaller markets like Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, etc., and "North-East" includes Shanghai, Beijing, Korea, Japan, and Northern Taiwan, everything runs between Taiwan and Philippines except for a couple of cables that head down to Australia (which is *really* the long way around) and a segment of the China-US Cable that goes between Taiwan and the mainland. And except for traffic that could take the Sydney-Guam-Japan route, or some traffic that could take land routes across China, everything north-south had to go at least to Hawaii and back, or usually to North America.


      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."

      • As another person who lost internet access outside of Thailand almost entirely after the Taiwan earthquake I find this very interesting indeed and it makes my day. As things are now, I lose at least half my bandwidth when I try to connect internationally. A better connection to the US would be literally a dream come true. CAT Telecom has a lousy 450 meg pipe to the International gateway. http://202.44.204.43/webstats/internetmap_current. php?Sec=internetmap_current [202.44.204.43]
        • by cathyy ( 120691 )
          Make that 2.5 gig, I misread the map.
          • Looks like a lot more than 2.5 Gbps, though most of the connections aren't bigger than that. I don't know whether the part of CAT that matters to you is IIG or NIX, but it looks like there are a lot of connections to other Internet carriers in the region, either within Thailand or else out to IIJ, C&W, etc. The TOT gateways aren't much bigger than 2.5 Gbps, but there's a total of 19+ Gbps, which is pretty respectable for a country the size of Thailand.
    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by elrous0 ( 869638 ) *
      And it will have the added bonus of letting India and China take 'yer jobs [wikipedia.org] at double the speed.
  • "Nothing for you to see hear."
    • by moogs ( 1003361 )
      Hooray for Malaysia! Although, being Malaysian, I wonder how many big-shots filled their pockets with millions before potting money into this project. Meh, it's Malaysia. I love my country and all (best food in the world. Trust me.) but the corruption is a problem... especially if there are major projects, you just know there are people making money off it...
  • by cojsl ( 694820 ) on Sunday April 29, 2007 @11:22PM (#18923911) Homepage
    Neil Stephenson's "Mother Earth Mother Board" is an great non fiction read about the cable laying culture: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr .html [wired.com]
    • Funny, I remember reading that article when it originally came out.

      There's one section in it, that reads somewhat differently today than it did in 1996:

      Building the lighthouse [of Alexandria] with its magic lens was a way of enhancing the city's natural capability for looking to the north, which made it into a world capital for many centuries. It's when a society plunders its ability to look over the horizon and into the future in order to get short-term gain - sometimes illusory gain - that it begins a lo

    • It is indeed a very interesting read (good old Stephenson!), thanks a lot for the link - keeping me entertained at work today ;)
    • I just got out of the bathroom. That's some cable-laying culture in there ...
    • See also cryptonomicon [cryptonomicon.com].
  • a couple questions (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ChipMonk ( 711367 ) on Sunday April 29, 2007 @11:25PM (#18923919) Journal
    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?

    2. Why must such a link be terrestrial/oceanic? Why not use satellite links?
    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by s800 ( 940543 )
      1- Find em with an OTDR. Pull it up, fix it.

      2- C
    • satellite links have horrible latency in general.
    • The terrestrial fiber in part backs up the satellite links, and vice-versa.

      Belt and Suspenders.

      I expect the latency from a one way trip of 12,500 miles is better than that of a round-trip to geosynchronous orbit.

      Disclaimer: IANATE ( I Am Not A Telecommunications Engineer ).

    • by Maxo-Texas ( 864189 ) on Sunday April 29, 2007 @11:35PM (#18923975)
      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: (Score:3, Informative)

        " 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] ?
      • by TubeSteak ( 669689 ) on Monday April 30, 2007 @01:28AM (#18924471) Journal
        You forgot to mention that it's harder snoop on a directional satellite than to tap a cable run.

        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: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by evilviper ( 135110 )

        Satellites == restricted bandwidth since it has to go by some frequency on the radio band.

        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.

        Satellites == susceptible to solar storms, debris, and (soon

        • What are the ongoing costs?

          Personell or do you have to refuel them or something?

          Yea- I'm not an expert- just answering the guy's questions with some googled crap.
          • What are the ongoing costs?

            Personell or do you have to refuel them or something?

            There's no way to refuel satellites, as of yet.

            Satellites aren't very smart, these days at least. For various reasons, they don't calculate their own flight paths, orientate or otherwise position themselves where they need to be, or anything of the sort. It all has to be calculated on the ground, and transmitted to the satellite around the clock, at a fully manned operation center, which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars

        • 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.

          Before you embark on this plan, make sure to first shoot down all the satellites that communicate with more than one earth station at a time, callously spraying their radio waves across wide swathes of our fair planet.

          • Before you embark on this plan, make sure to first shoot down all the satellites that communicate with more than one earth station at a time, callously spraying their radio waves across wide swathes of our fair planet.

            Nope, doesn't matter. Satellite dishes are so highly directional, and satellite signals are so weak, that even another satellite on the same frequency, just a couple degrees from the first, would register as only the tiniest amount of background noise.

            If you don't know anything about radio co

    • by yanyan ( 302849 )
      To answer question #2, IMHO a satellite link is just too unreliable to be used as major backbone. There are just too many factors that could disrupt proper communications: weather, solar conditions, possibly even obstructions of the line of sight between the satellite and the ground station.
    • by Tallweirdo ( 657529 ) on Monday April 30, 2007 @12:00AM (#18924079)

      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: (Score:1, Interesting)

        by guardiangod ( 880192 )
        They don't drag cables up- The whole thing is too heavy (Yes the cable itself is not very wide, but 100+km of it plus the repeaters every 2km are, as people say, pain in the ass).

        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.
        • The cable is too heavy to lift but floats up when cut?
        • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday April 30, 2007 @01:36AM (#18924505)
          Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • by guardiangod ( 880192 ) on Monday April 30, 2007 @02:15AM (#18924705)
            I admit I shouldn't use the word "float", but it's a slang for "bringing something up from undersea"

            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: (Score:3, Informative)

        by kestasjk ( 933987 )

        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.

    • How does one find breakages in 20,000 km of cable?

      With this [wikipedia.org].

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by 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]
      • by terrymr ( 316118 )
        A device called an OTDR will tell you how far along the cable the break is - then you go find it, haul it up to the ship with a big hook and fix it.
    • by fermion ( 181285 )
      I would guess this would be a redundant/upgraded link. I would also guess that the $500 million price tag, if they can get it done for that, is a relative bargain. Such money might only pay for 10-20 tons of launch capability, not counting design and construction costs.

      The US is working on other communication projects that will be sattilite based, at costs that will likely exceed 20 billion.

    • 2. Why must such a link be terrestrial/oceanic? Why not use satellite links?

      First look at the cost of a launch vehicel [futron.com] and the cost to create a communication satellite. Keep in mind light speed is slow and latency is an issue esp if we are talking geostationary orbit, which starts at at least twice the distance of the cable being proposed. We're talking 360ms on a good day, 500ms typical. Low earth orbit is preferable for communications, but one needs a network of satellites to maintain a link, vs a big
      • by British ( 51765 ) <british1500@gmail.com> on Monday April 30, 2007 @12:27AM (#18924227) Homepage Journal
        Keep in mind light speed is slow and latency is an issue esp if we are talking geostationary orbit, which

        But you know most of the data is going to be spam anyway, and you don't need low ping times for that data.
      • by cswiger ( 63672 )
        Keep in mind light speed is slow...

        Light is *slow*?! Umm, compared with what?

        I don't think we've gotten tachyon-based Internet connections working yet...although there are probably VC firms who would toss money at a startup which claimed to make such things. :-)

        Anyway, yes, you're right that it's much farther to do a round-trip to geosynchonous orbit than to do a bounce off of something in LEO, but the fixed position of geosync orbits is much more suitable for a continuous connection than having to swa

    • I heard they send out 'Larry the Cable Guy'
    • You can find a breakage by sending a pulse down a cable and looking for the reflections. A cable restorer ship is then despatcehd to trawl and hook the cable ends and splice it.
    • 1. Very Carefully.

      2. The latency on satellite links is a deal breaker. Amongst a heap of other reasons.
    • by Eddi3 ( 1046882 )
      Why must such a link be terrestrial/oceanic? Why not use satellite links?


      A low tech solution is almost always better then a high tech one, if possible. Not only does this make it reliable, but also easier to fix, etc, etc, etc. KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid)


      Also, as an added bonus, it's faster and less susceptible to interference, etc., and, therefor, the better tech in this case anyway.


      Eddie

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


      Look inside the optic cable like if you would use binoculars.
    • 1. Use an OTDR (optical time domain reflectometer). Basically send an optical pulse down the fiber, and wait for the refection at the break. Present a map with the break highlighted. Accuracy about 1 meter.

      2. a) A fiber cable has the bandwidth of a million satellites, and ping time of 60ms vs 400ms

  • But something tells me that there will be lots of filtering and other very tight controls over this network. I hope people will find a way around it should that happen.
    • What makes you say that?

      Although one telecom company or another may want to filter certain traffic, I seriously doubt that they can all agree on which traffic to filter, so there's no reason to filter it on this cable, at least not in some wholesale way. Any filtering is going to be done in exactly the same way as it's been done before: through firewalls and other packet shaping tools at the ISP level. And really, there's no reason to believe that this cable will have any impact on that, one way or anoth
      • by SnowZero ( 92219 )
        But this is Slashdot, where you are supposed to be unreasonable: I expect a Chinese-controlled firewall to be built into the cable at the 10,0000 km point, buried in hard seafloor under 2 miles of ocean. I heard it will also automatically enforce the DMCA, with a sideband control channel to the RIAA and MPAA headquarters.
      • What makes you say that?

        Guess you haven't noticed the trend to censor everything to "protect the children, prohibit unauthorized distribution", governments requesting backdoors and traffic logging, etc, etc. Let's not forget everybody's favorite, "terrorism". Oh, the list goes on. The companies are free to do what they want. I would prefer that people always keep an eye on an alternative to protect their rights if things go sour. Unfettered access is a necessity for free(as in freedom, though beer is nice)
    • I don't think there is filtering done on the backbone, save for China, has this been known to happen? All filtering seems to be done at the last mile.
  • by Gorimek ( 61128 ) on Sunday April 29, 2007 @11:27PM (#18923929) Homepage
    This is why the USS Jimmy Carter [defensetech.org] was built!
    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by modecx ( 130548 )
      Interesting, however, I think it would have been more apt were this ship named USS Richard Nixon.
    • by arivanov ( 12034 ) on Monday April 30, 2007 @01:26AM (#18924457) Homepage
      No need. Cable goes through Hawaii anyway and is under part American ownership by surprise surprise AT&T. Which we all know does not bend over to NSA and USA govt at their slightest whim even on internal in-the USA communications. Cough... Cough...
    • I sure the hell wouldn't want to be the poor tech who cuts that thing open. That's a really long haul for the DC current that runs the inline amplifiers. I bet it's in the tens of thousands of volt range. Tapping something like that wouldn't just be hard, it would be quite dangerous.
      • I'm pretty sure the "poor tech who cuts that thing open" is going to be in communication with the people at each end, who will turn off the power at the right time. Besides, if the link is broken, why would they need the repeaters going?
  • are spooks from that Co. list - but that's implied anyway, one would expect...
  • So is this cable going to tie in to Kinakuta at any point? I want my data haven!
    • So is this cable going to tie in to Kinakuta at any point? I want my data haven!

      So do I but where are you going to put it? My interpretation was that Kinakuta would be somewhere like Yogyakarta, but in this decade places like that are moving away from moderate Muslim rule to a more conservative version and I don't think it will work the same way now.

      Iceland might be the go.

  • by djupedal ( 584558 ) on Sunday April 29, 2007 @11:59PM (#18924075)
    "BusinessWeek is reporting on a new submarine cable system that will link South East Asia directly with the USA."

    I'm in southern China, and the way I heard it was "...a new submarine cable system that will link the USA directly with South East Asia."
    • by chill ( 34294 )
      I'm in southern China, and the way I heard it was "...a new submarine cable system that will link the USA directly with South East Asia."

      Yeah, it is one of them new-fangled, bi-directional cables. They're all the rage in Europe and needed for Internet 2.0, so make sure you upgrade!
      • Internet 3 will probably be a series of nano tubes. Every few seconds, the nano tubes will flip direction so that data can be sent the other way.
    • Hmm, at a point somewhere in the middle of the cable run: "...two new submarine cables that will link ???island directly with South East Asia and the USA for unprecedented connectivity to our tropical people's paradise..."
    • I'm in Shanghai and I heard it was "...a new submarine cable system will finally give Southern China decent Internet speeds"

      At least it quit raining here - hopefully May Day will be nice!

  • Yeah, then we can get our spam so much faster...
  • Anyone know of any maps of the proposed cable route?
  • by el_flynn ( 1279 ) on Monday April 30, 2007 @12:51AM (#18924335) Homepage
    TFA quotes that a "low-risk route was designed to avoid the volatile and hazardous Pacific Ring, thus mitigating the effects from natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis."

    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.
    • by grommit ( 97148 )
      So, you didn't bother to actually look closely at the diagram that you posted did you? Or did you just not notice the giant gap between the Bougainville trench and the Tonga trench? I'm betting they'll link the West coast through Hawaii and then through that gap. Not having RTFA I can't say for sure though.

      Trenches are bad. Areas without trenches are not so bad.
  • Let's see, that means the equivalent of 2000 gigabit connections, which is about 2 million megabit connetions. Given that a decent voice stream will require, say, 128kb, that's about 15 million concurrent VOIP streams simultaneously. Not bad!
    • Decent voice stream requiring 128kb? Toll-grade voice is only about 64kbps. Granted, thats not anywhere close to a "decent voice stream" in a true audio sense, but it's just a telephone call. The whole point of VOIP is that it saves bandwidth, i.e. most VOIP codecs use a lot less per second than traditional phone calls. If carriers were going to waste 128kbps on VOIP calls, there would be absolutely no sense to migrate to VOIP. It's all about the bandwidth.

      IIRC, G.729A voice codec = 8kbps. Granted you mig
  • Just filter out the spam sent from that region of the world... No increase in bandwidth would be necessary...
  • The correct "CAT Telekom" spelling is "CAT Telecom". It's mispelled from the news source.
  • ...allowing servicemen aboard US Submarines to receive the same lousy cable TV service from Comcast that you get.
  • by cheros ( 223479 )
    A while back I was under the impression that only Cable & Wireless still had a fleet capable of laying such cables, but I haven't kept up with it. Who does the actual bedding of the cable this time?

    I found the whole technology involved rather impressive..
  • I'm here in Thailand, and latency to anything in the US is an absolute killer. I can't even play BF2 it's so bad. I've included a traceroute to our favoutiet website...slashdot!

    traceroute to 66.35.250.150 (66.35.250.150), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
    1 * * *
    2 ppp-124.120.243.1.revip2.asianet.co.th (124.120.243.1) 66.286 ms 67.060 ms 66.054 ms
    3 ppp-210.86.189.71.revip.asianet.co.th (210.86.189.71) 63.658 ms 63.607 ms 81.493 ms
    4 10.169.71.1 (10.169.71.1) 82.281
    • To this I say ouch, however savvis.net has been known to be teh suck for peering. Dont take my word for it, poke around.
  • I'd prefer cables going to NZ/Aus. The internet service there is third-world.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • great now the spam will come @ 1.92Terabytes faster
  • why not have a cable that is buoyant such that it floats just a few hundred feet (or whatever safety margin is wanted) or so off the sea floor. If you wanted to avoid the problems of the sea floor I imagine that at those depths there arent too many large things to run into it.. but who knows.

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