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Subsea Cable to Connect Asia, Europe, and North America Through the Arctic

cinia.fi

61–67 of 67 posts

Re: Subsea Cable to Connect Asia, Europe, and North America Through the Arctic

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From what I understand Starlink satellites do not communicate between each other yet, maybe that's outdated info. It’s always been wrong. By design the Starlink satellites communicated with each other. Too cost prohibitive and infeasible in other ways to have a ground station covering every satellite.

While the long term plan was for Starlink satellites to communicate with each other, only the last four batches of v1.5 satellites have the actual hardware to do so, and the vast majority of Starlink satellites in orbit right now are only able to talk with ground stations and do not have the inter-satellite laser links.

You phrased it like it's no longer the long-term plan, but your next sentence indicates it is being progressed to. Older starlink sats without this laser link will eventually fall and burn up and be replaced.

Re: Subsea Cable to Connect Asia, Europe, and North America Through the Arctic

#62

I’ve never quite been able to understand from a technical perspective, but from a Geo political perspective, is why we can’t cut China off from western Internet? A better diplomatic sanction would be to block all Chinese internet traffic.

Because if you cut Chine off the internet, you wont even have electronics anymore. And within months IT in the west will collapse.

Re: Subsea Cable to Connect Asia, Europe, and North America Through the Arctic

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tapping undersea cables is one of the most critical missions modern day submarines conduct. So in short: every country that can get a sub that far north.

What entities of strategic importance are still sending unencrypted data over third party fiber?

Normal people do so all the time and their communications are of strategic importance as well.

Re: Subsea Cable to Connect Asia, Europe, and North America Through the Arctic

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From what I understand Starlink satellites do not communicate between each other yet, maybe that's outdated info. It’s always been wrong. By design the Starlink satellites communicated with each other. Too cost prohibitive and infeasible in other ways to have a ground station covering every satellite.

Yes but I think the plan is to have any satellite that is over a ground station to be the relay for others. Send up to a sat then sat to sat via laser and then down to the ground. I'm curious how far each satellite is from the other, do they need line-of-sight. And how much it adds to latency since signals received and sent have to go through networking equipment within each satellite.

> do they need line-of-sight.

Yes, they do.

> And how much it adds to latency since signals received and sent have to go through networking equipment within each satellite.

Negligible vs the impact “speed of light” (aka distance) already has added to the latency.

Re: Subsea Cable to Connect Asia, Europe, and North America Through the Arctic

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What entities of strategic importance are still sending unencrypted data over third party fiber?

Normal people do so all the time and their communications are of strategic importance as well.

What kind of “normal people communication” specifically are we referring to that isn’t encrypted on the wire?

Re: Subsea Cable to Connect Asia, Europe, and North America Through the Arctic

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tapping undersea cables is one of the most critical missions modern day submarines conduct. So in short: every country that can get a sub that far north.

What entities of strategic importance are still sending unencrypted data over third party fiber?

Metadata, which isn't encrypted, and is still the most powerful part of Prism/Xkeyscore, because most people don't try to understand it.

Re: Subsea Cable to Connect Asia, Europe, and North America Through the Arctic

#67
post #6

For anyone curious, there's an image of the route in this article: https://www.aroged.com/2021/12/24/far-north-digital-and-cini...

Interesting. I naively expected it to take the shortest/great circle route from Europe straight across northern Russia to Japan, but no, it actually loops the other way around the pole via Iceland and Canada.

Original route plan was exactly that, but there are reason why that route wasn't taken. This plan has been open for a decade aka ROTACS. But Russia started to build their own cable Polar Express - https://www.arctictoday.com/work-on-a-russian-trans-arctic-f...
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