> The critically important cable that connects Svalbard to the mainland is no thicker than a pinkie finger This is amazing. I wonder how much data per unit of time this is capable of transporting. Wikipedia says "Each segment has a speed of 10 gigabits per second (Gb/s), with a future potential capacity of 2,500 Gbit/s." [1] Wikipedia also notes that NASA helped fund this system. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sva…
Wait, an entire mainline for a country can do 10Gb/s and people somehow are paying for gigabit home Ethernet? Either the former is understated, or the latter is way overkill. Or, I'm misunderstanding. Which is probably the most likely possibility.
svalbard is a island, far away from mainland. Not many live there (3k people). But they likely have higher seasonal numbers (Tourists)
What would the Russian motivation be for blowing that up? They could have just turned off the gas supply.
The argument I remember goes something like this (and I could be remembering it wrong). They claimed technical problems prevented them from fulfilling the amount of gas required by their contract for NS1 and NS2. Due to sanctions they essentially had to provide gas for free - or at least in exchange for money they were unable to spend or access. The pipe blowing up potentially saved them from having to pay a penalty…
Why would Russia be concerned about a contract? Reminds me of a story on something like Unsolved Mysteries....lady had her husband killed because she was a christian, and thus, didn't believe in getting a divorce, and wanted to be with another man (his best friend.) And his friend went through with it...
> The critically important cable that connects Svalbard to the mainland is no thicker than a pinkie finger This is amazing. I wonder how much data per unit of time this is capable of transporting. Wikipedia says "Each segment has a speed of 10 gigabits per second (Gb/s), with a future potential capacity of 2,500 Gbit/s." [1] Wikipedia also notes that NASA helped fund this system. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sva…
Wait, an entire mainline for a country can do 10Gb/s and people somehow are paying for gigabit home Ethernet? Either the former is understated, or the latter is way overkill. Or, I'm misunderstanding. Which is probably the most likely possibility.
Svalbard is not a country, but a remote archipelago of Norway.
The main island, Spitsbergen has a population of 2.5k people, they don't allvuse the Internet (certainly not all at the same time), and they do not pay for gigabit home internet, more like 75Mbps.
For reference, the Southern Cross fiber network connecting Australia to the U.S. does more like 10+ Tbps.
Let's assume that these incidents actually were accidents, there's still a bigger question open: why is trawler fishing still allowed? Imagine it's not a fiber cable that ends up being crushed by a trawl door... but all the other marine life: Fish can swim away (or not, being the point of getting fished), but plants, corals, bugs? Trawler fishing is devastating for the local ecology, we just don't see the damage - to…
Fishing as carried out industrially is terrible for the environment as a whole, and really often also exploits those employed in it. The huge army of Asian fishing fleets that skirt the law and the ethics of both sides of this are the worst of the worst, however, and deep sea trawling is particularly awful. Then again, farmed fish isn't exactly ecologically brilliant either...
They do more than skirt laws and ethics. A large amount of fishing vessels operating in several regions around the world practice outright slavery. Working-age men are lured into debt-bonding to work at sea indefinitely for no wages up to 20 hours per day with little to no food until they succumb to exhaustion, injury, or disease, or if they show signs of resistance, are executed as an example to the other enslaved men. When someone dies, their remains are thrown overboard. Most accounts of this have only surfaced because people have bought the freedom of some of these men, who are seen as nothing but a labor resource, bought and paid for usually directly by the captain, in order to catch otherwise mostly unprofitable fish. If an industry is prepared to engage in slavery, playing fast and loose with international borders and environmental regulations is of course not a concern to that industry.
It's an open war with Ukraine only so far. And many are not aware of the wider geopolitics of it, they don't know their countries are at war with Russia. Open attacks would scare many of those people and make them more hostile towards the Russian side. As it stands many are more neutral and Putin even has a significant number of fans in the West.
Wait, an entire mainline for a country can do 10Gb/s and people somehow are paying for gigabit home Ethernet? Either the former is understated, or the latter is way overkill. Or, I'm misunderstanding. Which is probably the most likely possibility.
Svalbard is not a country, but a remote archipelago of Norway. The main island, Spitsbergen has a population of 2.5k people, they don't allvuse the Internet (certainly not all at the same time), and they do not pay for gigabit home internet, more like 75Mbps. For reference, the Southern Cross fiber network connecting Australia to the U.S. does more like 10+ Tbps.
All of this but also even in the case of bigger lines, a lot of home Internet traffic is not routed globally if you can avoid it. CDNs cache content on the same physical continent as much as possible, things like Netflix are usually streamed from your local ISP. A lot of traffic over the Internet is extremely unexciting things like Windows updates as well, which are generally globally served by a CDN (or even peer to peer sharing from other Internet users nearby).
> The critically important cable that connects Svalbard to the mainland is no thicker than a pinkie finger This is amazing. I wonder how much data per unit of time this is capable of transporting. Wikipedia says "Each segment has a speed of 10 gigabits per second (Gb/s), with a future potential capacity of 2,500 Gbit/s." [1] Wikipedia also notes that NASA helped fund this system. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sva…
> I wonder how much data per unit of time this is capable of transporting. The max throughput of fiber optic cables isn't exactly constant. As fiber optic modem and DSP technology improves you can get much higher speeds on 15+ year-old cables than were ever possible when they were laid. Recently I saw an article about researchers getting 300,000 Gbit/s over existing fiber optic cables (though I'm sure that's a long w…
This applies to single-mode cables, but much less to multi-mode cables. Of course long-distance cable like this is always single-mode, but it's worth keeping in mind if building a fiber network inside a building.
> The critically important cable that connects Svalbard to the mainland is no thicker than a pinkie finger This is amazing. I wonder how much data per unit of time this is capable of transporting. Wikipedia says "Each segment has a speed of 10 gigabits per second (Gb/s), with a future potential capacity of 2,500 Gbit/s." [1] Wikipedia also notes that NASA helped fund this system. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sva…
> I wonder how much data per unit of time this is capable of transporting. The max throughput of fiber optic cables isn't exactly constant. As fiber optic modem and DSP technology improves you can get much higher speeds on 15+ year-old cables than were ever possible when they were laid. Recently I saw an article about researchers getting 300,000 Gbit/s over existing fiber optic cables (though I'm sure that's a long w…
The Shannon limit is constant if you assume reasonable but idealized SNR values for the medium, and gives you a real "law of physics" upper limit ... typically still many orders of magnitude beyond what we can transmit today.
But it's amazing how effective DSP can be; trellis coding managed to get modems to squeeze right up to the Shannon limit of POTS telephone connections.
> The critically important cable that connects Svalbard to the mainland is no thicker than a pinkie finger This is amazing. I wonder how much data per unit of time this is capable of transporting. Wikipedia says "Each segment has a speed of 10 gigabits per second (Gb/s), with a future potential capacity of 2,500 Gbit/s." [1] Wikipedia also notes that NASA helped fund this system. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sva…
Wait, an entire mainline for a country can do 10Gb/s and people somehow are paying for gigabit home Ethernet? Either the former is understated, or the latter is way overkill. Or, I'm misunderstanding. Which is probably the most likely possibility.
Each individual fiber, which is a fraction of a cubic mm in cross sectional area, can provide this much bandwidth in a fairly trivial low-cost configuration. Cables like the one pictured carry many of these fibers.