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The Dunant subsea cable

cloud.google.com

251–260 of 262 posts

Re: The Dunant subsea cable

#251

Old timer story - years ago, Demon Internet (my old employer) was beginning to enter super-growth and wanted to really set itself up for trans-atlantic connections. So they decided to buy a T1 - 45Mbps link across the atlantic. Now it turns out that BT had only ever resold fractions of T1s - they had never actually had anyone want a whole one. And as such their sales commissions did not cap out. So, we rang up, a sal…

On a slightly later time scale, I still remember the time I first saw a OC192 linecard in a router in person, at a major IX point, and how incredibly impressed I was. This was in the era when a transcontinental, or submarine transatlantic OC192/STM64 circuit was an astonishingly huge amount of money every month.

The remember seeing one of those in a Uunet data center in north Dallas in the 90s. I was amazed at the tech and also amazed how ordinary it looked.

Re: The Dunant subsea cable

#252

This cable is not just to be used by Google right? Or am I misunderstanding something? Fundamentally, infrastructure should be publicly owned and then rented by companies to use it, in this case it seems like Google physically owns the cables and infrastructure which would be a massive waste.

>Fundamentally, infrastructure should be publicly owned a

No. Good market socialist solution in situations where network investment (electric grid, railway, telecom) creates natural monopolies, is forcing separation of the network and content.

For example electric grid owner must allow other sell and buy electricity trough the network. They can only get maintenance fee determined so that it cant be used to distort energy markets in favor of the company owning the grid.

In telecom it usually applies only for the last mile.

Re: The Dunant subsea cable

#253
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you've built a reliable detector, you've already built something that can intercept them. You just need to make a shroud around your detector and a tube facing your transmitter out of the same material.

There are ~65,000,000,000 neutrinos from the sun passing through each square centimeter of your hands every second as you read this. There are no materials on Earth that can reliably stop any given neutrino. For that, one needs densities greater than those generally found in stellar cores.

Neutrino detectors work by maximizing dumb luck through being both very large and very, very clean (low radioactivity). The transmitter-detector systems work by sending oodles of very energetic neutrinos at a well-defined time and looking for a rare coincident flash in the detector.

Re: The Dunant subsea cable

#254
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and create a supervolcano.

We already have one of those on land in the US.

We have two. I suspect that you are thinking of Yellowstone, but there is also the Long Valley Caldera in Eastern California. The Mammoth Mountain area.

Re: The Dunant subsea cable

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Alameda enterprises excited by rumours of new chord tunnel Thursday, low latency burrito delivery futures up 5%.

BagelRail was dual use before the fiasco

Re: The Dunant subsea cable

#256

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…

A number of the first trans-atlantic cables landed in the tiny village of Heart's Content, Newfoundland. I drove through there on a road trip about a decade ago & stopped at the excellent museum in the old cable station, and was excited to make my way across the highway to the beach to see this exact thing. It turns out that the old cables are just.... left to rust on the beach. It's really amazing that these cables,…

Pulling such a cable from Atlantic would be hard, expensive, and potentially dangerous to other cables.

And there are likely laws about not obstructing the shoreline.

Re: The Dunant subsea cable

#257
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Future Sound of London fan, I was so proud to be an early Demon dial-up customer when they name-checked their email address on Demon on their ground-breaking ISDN radio transmission on Radio 1. (To be read in a monotone female delivery) "For further information, please access the following code ... F S O L .. ACK ... F S O L ... DEMON ... CO ... UK" Good times - they were a wonderful company, thank you

For further information on any aspect of this broadcast contact PO BOX 1871. London W10 5ZL. Copyright has been retained in the sound and visual.

I was wrong - initial section I meant starts "For internet connection, please access the following code ...."

https://youtu.be/_8SBdkru4IY?t=128 At 2:26

Re: The Dunant subsea cable

#258
post #8

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

Especially the linked blog post, as it doesn't render unless you allow JavaScript from gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com (per uMatrix). Webdevs: is there a reason why a page would be designed so that JS being on is mandatory? Especially for something as prosaic as a couple of paragraphs of text.

Laziness, baroque toolchains, and (most probably): Shipping your org chart.

Re: The Dunant subsea cable

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And how are potential repeater unit failures accounted for?

Repeaters are designed to last for the lifetime of the cable plant. Design lifetimes are 25 years or so.

Repeater design is inherently very, very conservative because if the repeater fails, the cable fails. This results in an outage lasting days, if not weeks, as a cable ship is dispatched to the failure location.

The cable ship has to trawl for the cable and pull it up to the surface. Then the cable is cut and replaced with a new section that includes a new repeater to replace the failed one. Expensive.

Re: The Dunant subsea cable

#260
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've built a reliable detector, you've already built something that can intercept them. You just need to make a shroud around your detector and a tube facing your transmitter out of the same material.

There are ~65,000,000,000 neutrinos from the sun passing through each square centimeter of your hands every second as you read this. There are no materials on Earth that can reliably stop any given neutrino. For that, one needs densities greater than those generally found in stellar cores. Neutrino detectors work by maximizing dumb luck through being both very large and very, very clean (low radioactivity). The trans…

Any detector useful for communication is also an interceptor. The way we detect neutrinos now is not useful for communication.
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