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The Dunant subsea cable

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Re: The Dunant subsea cable

#131

Post by paul_f »

markphip wrote: post #31

I know there are many of these cables that have been around for years, but I am curious how are they physically secured? Especially where they transit from ocean to land? Is there some long underground/sea tunnel of conduit that the cable is routed through to the basement of some building? Or if you are walking along the beach somewhere is there just some cable running out of the ocean along the beach to some buildin…

What's more amazing than laying a transatlantic cable today? Doing it in 1858! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable

Re: The Dunant subsea cable

#133

Post by jlund-molfese »

nippoo wrote: post #119

This is super-cool! I found "enough to transmit the entire digitized Library of Congress three times every second" to be a really weird comparison though - I'm used to text being really small and compressible, and I doubt many people have an intuitive grasp of how much One Scanned Library of Congress is. How many hour-long Netflix/YouTube episodes per second, on the other hand...

I agree, but somehow a LoC became a well-established unit of measuring data transfer[1]. So maybe less-technical readers are used to hearing that comparison.

1 - https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/04/a-library-of-congres...

Re: The Dunant subsea cable

#134

Post by dekhn »

idlewords wrote: post #58
ksec wrote: post #52

I know a lot is focusing on the Bandwidth. But are we making any progress on Long Distance Subsea Cable using Hollow Core Cable, achieving close to maximum speed of light for theoretical lowest latency possible? Imagine cutting latency from West Coast US to Hong Kong by 50ms! Light is only traveling at around 2/3 of speed within Fibre. The previous decades have been around Bandwidth. Is time we shift out focus to lat…

You gotta bore for that sweet latency win. A chord tunnel between San Francisco and Hong Kong would save 1300 miles (20% improvement right there), and if you drill it straight enough, you won't even need a cable.

couldn't you start experiments using the Alameda-Weekhauken tunnel?

Re: The Dunant subsea cable

#135

Post by BelenusMordred »

ceejayoz wrote: post #61
BelenusMordred wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how are they physically secured Multiple nations have specialised subs to tap into them. I doubt you'd find anyone willing to make such a guarantee. They are impossible to secure in any way and you need to rely on security assurances at different layers instead.

This was done in the 70s/80s, but I doubt it's worth the effort now. It only worked because the Soviets assumed the cables were inaccessible. End-to-end encryption is a thing even for the general public now. Now we just compromise the servers/routers. https://gizmodo.com/the-nsa-actually-intercepted-packages-to...

> I doubt it's worth the effort now

It's very much still happening. Metadata is enough for intel purposes, storage is ridiculously cheap and post-quantum breaks of key exchange is forever 20 years away like fusion.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/26/world/europe/russian-pres...

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/th...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/spy-agency-taps-into-undersea-...

Re: The Dunant subsea cable

#136

Post by atonse »

jxcl wrote: post #127
thomaslangston wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More feasible would be transmitting neutrinos or some other signal that would not be blocked by the Earth.

> More feasible If they don't interact with the thousands of miles of earth between the source and the destination, they probably also won't interact with the receiver! :p Imagine the retransmission rates! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_detector

And you'd also have to ignore all the insane amounts of noise coming from regular neutrinos wizzing about in the universe.

Re: The Dunant subsea cable

#137

Post by iptrans »

aynyc wrote: post #117
tzs wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably cheaper than people would expect because the long run across the deep ocean is a lot more straightforward than most people would expect. 1. For the deep ocean parts of the route, cables and associated equipment (such as repeaters) are simply spooled out from the back of the cable laying ship, to settle on the ocean floor. 2. For shallow waters, the cable is buried. This is done by dragging a plow along…

> Assuming the underwater cable itself is 10 times as expensive as regular cable, its about $150 million for 9000 km. Looking at what I can find, it looks like way more than 10 times the cost. https://i.imgur.com/7Dm7EEp.jpg

10x is a fair estimate of cost vs regular armored fiber cable.

Source: I've laid subsea cable.

Re: The Dunant subsea cable

#138

Post by iptrans »

eitland wrote: post #103
tzs wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably cheaper than people would expect because the long run across the deep ocean is a lot more straightforward than most people would expect. 1. For the deep ocean parts of the route, cables and associated equipment (such as repeaters) are simply spooled out from the back of the cable laying ship, to settle on the ocean floor. 2. For shallow waters, the cable is buried. This is done by dragging a plow along…

> Assuming the underwater cable itself is 10 times as expensive as regular cable, its about $150 million for 9000 km. Still sounds really inexpensive when I consider it contains a large number of repeaters and is meant to stay at the bottom of the ocean. Edit: Forgot to write, I haven't run the numbers myself but I enjoyed your reasoning here, you put a smile on my face : > At 5 knots, it would take about 1000 hours…

Fortunately you only need repeaters every 80 km or so, so you'd only need a bit over a hundred repeaters across the 9000 km span.

Repeaters aren't terrible expensive, so they only add a few million to the total cost.

Re: The Dunant subsea cable

#139

Post by atonse »

adriancooney wrote: post #88

Excellent related Ars Technica article related to deep-sea cables if you want to learn more: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/how-t...

Mother Earth Mother Board is one of my all time favorite articles, which chronicles the laying of a cable.

https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

Re: The Dunant subsea cable

#140

Post by c22 »

a012 wrote: post #18
onion2k wrote: post #8

You could load a modern Javascript-powered website in less than a minute with that.

My browser loads that page like forever, until I remember to _allow_ javascript on that page, like why on earth they render everything except the content at all.

Yeah, it's one thing to build a page that wont render without Javascript, but making the only part that does render be a never-ending spinner is just rude.
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