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Map of worldwide undersea cables

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Re: Map of worldwide undersea cables

#41

Post by mirkules »

fairlyodd wrote: post #40

Ok - I'm curious. How do you lay a cable across the Atlantic Ocean - a length that spans thousands of miles?

I thought about this too, so I let my imagination wander:

Solution 1: Perhaps there's a ship pulling a cable attached to a reel, and it periodically drops the cable in the ocean with an anchor weight. The first few times they did this, the engineers miscalculated the length of the cable. As the ship sailed on, the reel got ripped from the ship's hull, the boat sank and the captain didn't have a connection to send an SOS. Ironically, the connection was at the bottom of the ocean, still attached to the reel.

Solution 2: Organize dolphins to pull cables across the Atlantic. Unfortunately, the spinner dolphin species was chosen, resulting in many miles of twisted fiber-optic cable. As you know, having kinks in fiber-optic cables is a bad thing.

Solution 3: Use the Blues Brothers' car (with a cop engine, cop suspension and cop brakes), roll up the windows and drive across the sea floor, laying the cable down. I think this is how they actually did it

Re: Map of worldwide undersea cables

#43

Post by pmjordan »

aerique wrote: post #28

Quite a lot of those cables split in the middle of the ocean but zooming in I don't see any islands. What would such an undersea junction look like? Or would it be a platform?

I have a feeling they're actually separate cables that are laid at the same time. Maybe they're even bound together in some way. It would be interesting to know for sure.

EDIT: it turns out the cables do actually branch, using one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_branching_unit

Re: Map of worldwide undersea cables

#44

Post by woodall »

pmjordan wrote: post #43
aerique wrote: post #28

Quite a lot of those cables split in the middle of the ocean but zooming in I don't see any islands. What would such an undersea junction look like? Or would it be a platform?

I have a feeling they're actually separate cables that are laid at the same time. Maybe they're even bound together in some way. It would be interesting to know for sure. EDIT: it turns out the cables do actually branch, using one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_branching_unit

Here are some images and information I found on these types of units.

http://www.fujitsu.com/global/services/telecom/solution/subm...

http://global.mitsubishielectric.com/bu/communication/transm...

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6809934.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6534712.html

http://www.techcentral.co.za/aboard-the-ship-that-keeps-sa-c...

Re: Map of worldwide undersea cables

#50

Post by sasvari »

jodrellblank wrote: post #12

Why is there a 5TBps line from the northern part of mainland Norway up to Svalbard? Is there much telecomms there?

wikipedia helps with that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Undersea_Cable_System

The earth/ground station on Svalbard is a key site for collecting remote sensing data from polar orbiting satellites, such as those from NOAA, due to its close proximity to the north pole (many of these satellites are polar orbitors; e.g. follow an orbit which almost crosses over the pole).

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