71–80 of 114 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given the high price of copper I would guess that they pull the copper cables out after service. I am not so sure about fiber cables.
Given the cost of such an operation, I don't think you can get some profit even if they were made of gold. As time passes, most of the cable is buried deeper and deeper under debris that falls on the ocean floor. This means that you cannot just pull it up, you would have to dig to get it out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People laid undersea cables for telegraphs and back then it was a big deal. However, it's been 154 years and people stopped being impressed a while ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable
Modern telecoms cable is some amazing stuff. These days there's no metal in the entire cable. Instead, it's all lasers through glass fiber, and when the signal attenuates, it gets boosted by passing through sections of doped fiber that lase using power from another beam , adding power to the signal. And we can do this just as easily as the people back then dropped telegraph cable. For me, at least, there's always som…
First, most EDFA (Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifiers) need power to operate since the lasers that perform the pumping action are local to the doped sections of fiber.
Second, most submarine cables make extensive use of Raman amplification which leverages the transmission fiber as a gain medium via forward or backward pumping of lasers with frequencies chosen to produce Raman gain.
In both cases, you need an amplifier every 70-100km (150km in some cases) in order to have a usable signal on a long span.
Another map that is quite complete (more older cables) too: http://www.cablemap.info/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Modern telecoms cable is some amazing stuff. These days there's no metal in the entire cable. Instead, it's all lasers through glass fiber, and when the signal attenuates, it gets boosted by passing through sections of doped fiber that lase using power from another beam , adding power to the signal. And we can do this just as easily as the people back then dropped telegraph cable. For me, at least, there's always som…
That's not strictly true. First, most EDFA (Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifiers) need power to operate since the lasers that perform the pumping action are local to the doped sections of fiber. Second, most submarine cables make extensive use of Raman amplification which leverages the transmission fiber as a gain medium via forward or backward pumping of lasers with frequencies chosen to produce Raman gain. In both cases,…
Why are there so many cables to Alaska?
I cannot help but salivate at the dense links connecting US/Europe and US/Asia. Here in Kenya we only have 3 cables. Since last week the internet has been very slow after the main cable was severed by a ship anchor. The second cable seemed to have problems upstream so all the traffic has been routed to the third cable. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/28/east-africa-inte...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given the cost of such an operation, I don't think you can get some profit even if they were made of gold. As time passes, most of the cable is buried deeper and deeper under debris that falls on the ocean floor. This means that you cannot just pull it up, you would have to dig to get it out.
Most cables don't run on the seabed.
wow...Mercator Projection!
This is a Mercator-like projection that assumes the Earth is a sphere instead of an ellipsoid. Many online mapping systems use this projection because it is a much simpler calculation than than a more correct Mercator projection would require.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/weird-...