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Submarine Cable Map 2014

submarine-cable-map-2014.telegeography.com

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Re: Submarine Cable Map 2014

#91

Post by Scoundreller »

cgusto wrote: post #85
rbanffy wrote: post #83

When a telco hired me (they were the owners of the portal I worked for) I got, as a gift, a book with beautiful maps detailing where their fiber network, down to street corner level. I called it the Modern Terrorist Manual. With that book in hand (and I don't know how many copies were actually made) any resourceful bad guy could knock off about 60% of Brazil's phone and data network.

Yes, it is scary when you realize how susceptible some of this infrastructure is. Reminds me of an instance in 2009. I was working in Santa Cruz, CA. I was configuring some of our servers remotely, when suddenly I lost internet connection. The whole office was out. VoIP was down - no signal on my cell phone as well. I went to the front desk and tried the land line. No dial tone. This was weird. I saw a few people fro…

I'm a little surprised Starbucks wouldn't just revert to cash mode? Who cares about exact prices when everyone involved knows that each items costs no more than a few cents. Just round to the nearest dollar, and any competent manager would reward such behaviour given the alternative.

At least this is my experience with pharmacy billing. If we couldn't put claims through due to network problems, we'd just estimate based on your previous claims and keep things humming along.

Re: Submarine Cable Map 2014

#92

Post by ck2 »

spacefight wrote: post #10
ck2 wrote: post #8

Hard to imagine NSA intercepts most of that.

Really? http://amzn.com/006097771X

I didn't meant that as denying they did it, quite the opposite, I am sure they do with unlimited taxpayer money.

Just that the cost to intercept all that must be staggering.

Re: Submarine Cable Map 2014

#93

Post by dghughes »

RankingMember wrote: post #2

It still amazes me that we laid giant bundles of cabling at the bottom of the ocean and they're as reliable as they are.

Me too but then if you think about it you can lay a cable around the biggest part of the earth the equator that's about 40,000km. If you have a geostationary satellite that's about 35,000km. Pretty close but latency is a tiny bit worse for the satellite T=D/V

Equator at 40,075km / 209,855km/s=0.19s (saw a Stack Exchange question about speed of light in optical fibre slows light 30%).

And for satellites 35,000km / 299,792km/s=0.12s but I'm sure air, humidity, big balls of floating water aka clouds, solar radiation just weather in general must make it far worse I've seen mentions of typical latency of 0.25s.

But most cables are not 40,000km long I don't know what the longest cable is of the typical length probably 20,000km max that would give 0.09s latency and for 10,000km 0.05s.

Re: Submarine Cable Map 2014

#94

Post by btoptical »

arc_of_descent wrote: post #5

Does each cable actually lie at the sea bed? What if the route comes across a really deep part of the ocean?

In some cases the cable is buried on the sea floor by a special plow. It's incredible that the cable can be buried up to 6m deep in the mud on the bottom. Cable burial is intended to keep fishing equipment from snagging cables laid on the bottom.

http://youtu.be/QRwZ1hlj9F8

Re: Submarine Cable Map 2014

#95

Post by btoptical »

bladedtoys wrote: post #30
japhyr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in southeast AK. An earthquake near Glacier Bay this month broke one of the undersea cables, which caused an outage for customers of one service provider. I had no idea there were multiple cables to southeast, until I read about the response to this incident. The Capital City Weekly has a good article about the recent incident, which also includes a short history of communication cables in Alaska [0]. Basicall…

I wonder why they didn't just lay them along the alcan highway? Surely that would have been a zillion times cheaper.

It's easier to lay a subsea cable than to go overland in remote areas. Take a look at the subsea map of Africa as an example. In Africa the subsea links are there because it's too remote to run cables through the jungle or across the Sahara. Additionally terrestrial cables are more frequently cut than subsea cables. In India terrestrial fibers are cut routinely every day to the point that they have to allocate extra repair margin for the links.

Re: Submarine Cable Map 2014

#96

Post by toomuchtodo »

btoptical wrote: post #94
arc_of_descent wrote: post #5

Does each cable actually lie at the sea bed? What if the route comes across a really deep part of the ocean?

In some cases the cable is buried on the sea floor by a special plow. It's incredible that the cable can be buried up to 6m deep in the mud on the bottom. Cable burial is intended to keep fishing equipment from snagging cables laid on the bottom. http://youtu.be/QRwZ1hlj9F8

Jets of water are used to bury the cable closer to shore, and if I recall correctly, Google used Kevlar on their latest cables to reinforce them against sharks.

Re: Submarine Cable Map 2014

#97

Post by lstamour »

MichaelGG wrote: post #77
analyticsjam wrote: post #51

I spent a few years supporting these from the financial end. Modern cables are built in a loop so that they automatically fail-over. For instance, most Trans-Atlantic cables have pops in New York, Florida, England, and mainland Europe. If there is a cut in one segment, traffic automatically switches to the other. Most customers these days are also on products that mux across these cables. So, if your Trans-Atlantic c…

So if someone can cut them with their clippers by accident, certainly a malicious actor could wreak tons of havoc? Why does this not seem to occur? Even from a juvenile "hey I turned off the Internet lol" kind of level?

Overloading the 512K BGP tables was a fun way for people to toss a monkey wrench into the Internet. But then, it didn't affect everyone easily and nor would cutting a cable, which not only doesn't affect everyone, but, I imagine, is rather hard to do. It's much easier to mess with the Internet using software, and by doing so remotely, you've a better chance of not getting arrested for it, I imagine.

Re: Submarine Cable Map 2014

#98

Post by usbreply »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #76
elsjaako wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that electrical cables have pretty low current. The fiber optic ones need to power amplifiers, so they have quite a bit of power going through.

I guess I figured copper wire would also required amplification.

Yes, copper cables have repeaters too. And I would expect them to work at similar voltages.

The only difference I can think of is that the amplifier power is probably a steady DC (and corresponding magnetic field) whereas the signal in copper will be varying voltages - creating a fluctuating magnetic field that repels the sharks ?

Re: Submarine Cable Map 2014

#99

Post by phil21 »

maxmcd wrote: post #49
frandroid wrote: post #41

$250 for the paper copy? Really?

It's a b b play. They're not looking to sell to consumers, they sell to companies that need this map for reference.

Eh.. This map is not useful whatsoever for reference, other than in a general "sales guy" sort of sense.

Speaking for my company, I buy these each year because A) It looks great framed in our lobby and B) I want to support continued development of such things.

When you compare them to actual fiber maps, they are accurate mostly in the general sense and not all that useful for planning specific routes anywhere.

Re: Submarine Cable Map 2014

#100

Post by Spooky23 »

rbanffy wrote: post #83

When a telco hired me (they were the owners of the portal I worked for) I got, as a gift, a book with beautiful maps detailing where their fiber network, down to street corner level. I called it the Modern Terrorist Manual. With that book in hand (and I don't know how many copies were actually made) any resourceful bad guy could knock off about 60% of Brazil's phone and data network.

It's pretty easy for anyone with half a brain to target infrastructure.

I worked in places that made it difficult even for employees with a need to know to access network data and locations of wan fiber connections. Half the time, the cables are clearly marked on the street -- in New York, you call 611 and a team of people will draw on the street the locations of all telecom, electric, water, sewer and other infrastructure right on the street for you.

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