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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

#41

Post by twic »

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.

'Disneyland With The Death Penalty':

https://www.wired.com/1993/04/gibson-2/

Another article which left a mark on me is Bruce Sterling's 'The Future? You don't want to know':

https://www.wired.com/1995/11/wired-scenarios-future-dont-wa...

In the original print edition, this was a tumult of mad typography, as well as an essay, which was a very Wired thing but taken to extremes. Appropriately for a cyberpunk writer, it may not entirely hang together logically, but it delivers a thrilling stream of eyeball kicks. I still remember the conclusion:

Real futurism means staring directly into your own grave and accepting the slow but thorough obliteration of everyone and everything you know and love.

Does this sound like fun? It can be.

Just don't expect it to move a lot of product.

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

#42

Post by Havoc »

kimi wrote: post #37
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 se…

That seems a little surprising. Certain residential areas in South Africa have gigabit fibre so I'd not expect kilobyte anything and certainly no total black holes from a respectable DC

Just annoyingly high latency and a bit of jitter and shitty pricing on local cloud stuff (though prob better now with azure)

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

#43

Post by ageofwant »

Havoc wrote: post #18
peter_retief wrote: post #11

I wonder if Google have plans for Cape Town? It is the most tech savvy city on the continent

They should. Amazon is hoovering up all the local talent currently

iirc a significant block of Amazon's tech was developed in Cape Town over the last decade or so.

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

#44

Post by billfruit »

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…

The first transatlantic cable was laid in 1858. I guess the major continents all had been connected before the end of 1800s.

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

#45

Post by lgleason »

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

This is going to be a private cable owned entirely by Google. Thus I think the main focus is on providing Google with connectivity for their services. While I would love to think that this will improve connectivity down there to Europe etc. I'm skeptical because it's Google.

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

#48

Post by twic »

> Once complete, Equiano will start in western Europe and run along the West Coast of Africa, between Portugal and South Africa, with branching units along the way that can be used to extend connectivity to additional African countries.

I understand how undersea cables are laid, but how do you make use of a "branching unit" once it's at the bottom of the sea? Send down a submersible to plug in the branch? Lift the cable back up, plug in the branch, and lower it again? Do they lay the cable with patch leads attached to the branching units, so you just have to dredge those up and plug the rest of the branch in?

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

#50

Post by stephenhuey »

twic wrote: post #48

> Once complete, Equiano will start in western Europe and run along the West Coast of Africa, between Portugal and South Africa, with branching units along the way that can be used to extend connectivity to additional African countries. I understand how undersea cables are laid, but how do you make use of a "branching unit" once it's at the bottom of the sea? Send down a submersible to plug in the branch? Lift the ca…

I’ve seen photos of internet cables lifted onto ships to work on them. This article explains how one uses a massive robot to find them:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/subsea-internet-cable-ship-b...

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