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Equiano, a subsea cable from Portugal to South Africa

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Re: Equiano, a subsea cable from Portugal to South Africa

#31

Post by wtdata »

Related and a big reason for the existence of this new cable: https://www.skatelescope.org/

The Square Kilometre Array, on its initial phase, will have close to 200 dish radio telescopes and 130000 radio antennas working together in South Africa and Australia. The amount of data produced is predicted at 50% of all internet traffic (this was calculated 2 years ago, probably it changed a bit). A big part of that data will be distributed across the globe for science, being the main link originating in South Africa and ending up in Europe.

This will be the biggest scientific endeavor (by size) of mankind so far.

The Phase 2 of the SKA (for now just an idea), will increase the number of telescope dishes and antennas by a factor of 10.

Re: Equiano, a subsea cable from Portugal to South Africa

#33

Post by prepend »

mbreese wrote: post #29
FearNotDaniel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heartily recommend Andrew Blum's book Tubes: Behind the Scenes at the Internet for any non-technical folks interested in the physical infrastructure that makes all that internet magic happen. It's more in the travel memoir/popular history genres than actual engineering, but a very atmospheric layman's introduction. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23047146-tubes And of course, if you're ever in SW England, the M…

My favorite Wired article of all time was the 1996 article written by Neal Stephenson all about undersea cables. I can’t believe I was able to find a link, but I may still have the physical copy someplace. That was an amazing example of long form writing and was my introduction to Stephenson. https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

I really miss wired.

I got into the Internet with their 93 article by William Gibson where they sent him to Singapore.

It was a really neat place to have articles by people like Stephenson and Gibson.

Re: Equiano, a subsea cable from Portugal to South Africa

#34

Post by samstave »

prepend wrote: post #33
mbreese wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite Wired article of all time was the 1996 article written by Neal Stephenson all about undersea cables. I can’t believe I was able to find a link, but I may still have the physical copy someplace. That was an amazing example of long form writing and was my introduction to Stephenson. https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

I really miss wired. I got into the Internet with their 93 article by William Gibson where they sent him to Singapore. It was a really neat place to have articles by people like Stephenson and Gibson.

Heh do you recall Mondo 2000

It was what wired was inspired by...

Also since we are on the topic: 2600 was a great phreaking resource back in the day... 2600 may still be going though...

Re: Equiano, a subsea cable from Portugal to South Africa

#35

Post by samstave »

Symbiote wrote: post #28
tim333 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I googled and found this https://ore.catapult.org.uk/app/uploads/2018/02/Export-Cable... Costs between £5.3m and £15.5m Wikipedia has a nice gif of the repair process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable... Funny random thing from that. In 1959 the Americans got annoyed by a Russian trawler breaking their cable and complained they'd broken the Convention for the Protection of Submarine Telegra…

> Who'da thought this was going on in 1884? It's well-known in Britain, at least. It looks to be part of the science examination taken at age 16 [2]. On your Wikipedia page, the section "British dominance of early cable" [1] describes the early success in this technology. Last time I was at the Science Museum in London, they had an exhibition on transatlantic cables. I think it's part of the permanent exhibition. [0]…

You would probably be interested in looking into the USS Jimmy Carter submarine....

The one the NSA uses to pull up and splice spying equipment into undersea cables....

Re: Equiano, a subsea cable from Portugal to South Africa

#36

Post by cheerlessbog »

tim333 wrote: post #26
hanniabu wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When we're saying incredibly expensive, what are we talking here? $10M repair job?

I googled and found this https://ore.catapult.org.uk/app/uploads/2018/02/Export-Cable... Costs between £5.3m and £15.5m Wikipedia has a nice gif of the repair process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable... Funny random thing from that. In 1959 the Americans got annoyed by a Russian trawler breaking their cable and complained they'd broken the Convention for the Protection of Submarine Telegra…

“Britain's very first action after declaring war on Germany in World War I was to have the cable ship Alert (not the CS Telconia as frequently reported)[12] cut the five cables linking Germany with France, Spain and the Azores, and through them, North America.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cab...

Re: Equiano, a subsea cable from Portugal to South Africa

#37

Post by kimi »

Havoc wrote: post #19

This is great. SA feels quite far away from the rest of the Internet (think 200ms) so anything that helps improve connectivity is a possive. Especially since this might foreshadow a local data center there. Azure has tech there. Google doesn't. Yet

We run stuff in a datacenter in Cape Town, and the quality of the connection to our C&C systems in Switzerland is sometimes awful bad - very slow, or routing issues where you have total black holes for minutes. We run similar workloads in the US and Singapore, but international connectivity is nowhere that bad. In spite of this, SA has an excellent tech scene and plenty of talent.

On the other hand, I feel younger seeing transfer rates in tens of kilobytes.... straight out of the roaring 90's.

Re: Equiano, a subsea cable from Portugal to South Africa

#38

Post by cheerlessbog »

rdevsrex wrote: post #20
Havoc wrote: post #19

This is great. SA feels quite far away from the rest of the Internet (think 200ms) so anything that helps improve connectivity is a possive. Especially since this might foreshadow a local data center there. Azure has tech there. Google doesn't. Yet

Really? Sometimes when there is a problem with out of SA connectivity the only non-local websites that work are Google and YouTube. I’ve got 20ms ping times so Google must have a point of presence in SA.

Azure recently opened a datacenter, apparently AWS and GCP do not yet have one.

https://www.geekwire.com/2019/microsofts-south-african-data-...

Re: Equiano, a subsea cable from Portugal to South Africa

#39

Post by virtuallynathan »

This cable has a design capacity of ~320Tbps with 16 fiber pairs. The previously announced transatlantic cable, Dunant cable has 12 fiber pairs and a 250Tbps design capacity. These values could probably increase to around 480Tbps and 360Tbps with more advanced optical transmission equipment.

Re: Equiano, a subsea cable from Portugal to South Africa

#40

Post by fauria »

Havoc wrote: post #19

This is great. SA feels quite far away from the rest of the Internet (think 200ms) so anything that helps improve connectivity is a possive. Especially since this might foreshadow a local data center there. Azure has tech there. Google doesn't. Yet

From AWS blog:

"(Amazon) will be opening an AWS Region in South Africa in the first half of 2020. The new Region will be based in Cape Town, will be comprised of three Availability Zones, and will give AWS customers and partners the ability to run their workloads and store their data in South Africa."

https://aws.amazon.com/es/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-region-...

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