Submarine cables are a mystery to a lot of people. I had to show my dad a complete map of the cables once to convince him they exist. He just couldn’t fathom we’re actually able to run thousands of km of cables at the bottom of the ocean.
I heartily recommend Andrew Blum's book Tubes: Behind the Scenes at the Internet for any non-technical folks interested in the physical infrastructure that makes all that internet magic happen. It's more in the travel memoir/popular history genres than actual engineering, but a very atmospheric layman's introduction.
My favorite Wired article of all time was the 1996 article written by Neal Stephenson all about undersea cables. I can’t believe I was able to find a link, but I may still have the physical copy someplace. That was an amazing example of long form writing and was my introduction to Stephenson.
Thanks for sharing! I remember enjoying the undersea cable plot in Cryptonomicon.
Inspired by another recent HN post about subsea cables, I'm currently reading The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage which walks through the history of the telegraph. It blows my mind that North America and Europe were connected by undersea cable before the start of the Civil War.
In the original print edition, this was a tumult of mad typography, as well as an essay, which was a very Wired thing but taken to extremes. Appropriately for a cyberpunk writer, it may not entirely hang together logically, but it delivers a thrilling stream of eyeball kicks. I still remember the conclusion:
Real futurism means staring directly into your own grave and accepting the slow but thorough obliteration of everyone and everything you know and love.
Figure out roughly where the problem is (a number of ways of doing this), then send a boat out with a hook to grab the cable off the bottom of the ocean. Pull it up to the surface, fix it, and lower it back down.
Incredibly expensive operation, so you want to avoid this if at all possible...
Funny random thing from that. In 1959 the Americans got annoyed by a Russian trawler breaking their cable and complained they'd broken the Convention for the Protection of Submarine Telegraph Cables of 1884. Who'da thought this was going on in 1884?
It's well-known in Britain, at least. It looks to be part of the science examination taken at age 16 [2].
On your Wikipedia page, the section "British dominance of early cable" [1] describes the early success in this technology.
Last time I was at the Science Museum in London, they had an exhibition on transatlantic cables. I think it's part of the permanent exhibition. [0] [3]
They don't do that with most of the cables, the cable just comes ashore and goes into the NSA/GCHQ box and that is it.
So I guess that Google have done a deal with the devil already with this, wherever that cable comes ashore will be the mystery room with mystery kit inside, much like what goes on in Sennen in Cornwall. Cable and Wireless operate the cable, it goes to the GCHQ box that then connects with GCHQ in Bude and then on to the doughnut in Cheltenham where the spying for the NSA is done. This is the 'special relationship'.
Nobody thinks Google is evil(!) so you have to wonder how much is done as per the 'Glomar Explorer', with the whole thing being a bit of a cover story. The race is on for Africa with the option being Google doing it or the dreaded Huawei doing it, which would really mean getting the USS Jimmy Carter out.
“Britain's very first action after declaring war on Germany in World War I was to have the cable ship Alert (not the CS Telconia as frequently reported)[12] cut the five cables linking Germany with France, Spain and the Azores, and through them, North America.”
I believe they had enough wireless stations to get across the Atlantic or they could communicate via diplomatic bag through neutral countries/ones with intact cables
What measures are taken to avoid this? I read somewhere that these cable are not actually buried into the ground, but rather lay on top of the ground. That sounds very risky to me?
They are buried only when close to shores or in other high risk areas. There is no point in burying a cable if the sea bed is 3 miles under the surface. There is still danger, from animals biting into the cable (sharks are known to do this). But the cables are wrapped in steel cables so not even a shark should be able to cut through.
> There is no point in burying a cable if the sea bed is 3 miles under the surface.
There is a point, it's just not something we're able to do. You can get the cable onto the sea bed by lowering it from the surface. We know how to get to the surface.
To bury it, you'd need to run a digging operation at the bottom of the ocean.
...which we're able to do, we do somewhat similar digs for offshore oil all the time, but it's not worth the gargantuan expense. The risk of leaving it exposed is worth it.
Well I still have trouble with that, and a map wouldn't help very much. Imagine convincing governments to make the huge en-devour of placing thousands of kilometers of cables under the sea, and maintaining them, just for some "nerd stuff". If they did, they probably had a very good reason convincing them.
Except that is generally not governments doing it; it is private companies. It is pure profit motive. Despite the great cost, the cables are profitable.
This is great. SA feels quite far away from the rest of the Internet (think 200ms) so anything that helps improve connectivity is a possive. Especially since this might foreshadow a local data center there. Azure has tech there. Google doesn't. Yet
"(Amazon) will be opening an AWS Region in South Africa in the first half of 2020. The new Region will be based in Cape Town, will be comprised of three Availability Zones, and will
give AWS customers and partners the ability to run their workloads and store their data in South Africa."
Really? Sometimes when there is a problem with out of SA connectivity the only non-local websites that work are Google and YouTube. I’ve got 20ms ping times so Google must have a point of presence in SA.
We run stuff in a datacenter in Cape Town, and the quality of the connection to our C&C systems in Switzerland is sometimes awful bad - very slow, or routing issues where you have total black holes for minutes. We run similar workloads in the US and Singapore, but international connectivity is nowhere that bad. In spite of this, SA has an excellent tech scene and plenty of talent.
On the other hand, I feel younger seeing transfer rates in tens of kilobytes.... straight out of the roaring 90's.
We run lots of DC stuff in Cape Town and the connection to Europe is excellent. Which data center are you using? Something does not sound right here - perhaps faulty hardware, dodgy datacenter or similar. If you want, I can refer you several reputable providers.
"If you want, I can refer you several reputable providers."
In Cape Town? I would have thought the best/only provider would be Hetzner South Africa? If you could recommend more, of similar quality, that would be appreciated.
There are several. Teraco is probably the best, then you have IS, Liquid Telecom, Vox, Hetzner, Vodacom. I think those all have tier 3 DC's in CPT, but you should call them to confirm.
That seems a little surprising. Certain residential areas in South Africa have gigabit fibre so I'd not expect kilobyte anything and certainly no total black holes from a respectable DC
Just annoyingly high latency and a bit of jitter and shitty pricing on local cloud stuff (though prob better now with azure)
This is going to be a private cable owned entirely by Google. Thus I think the main focus is on providing Google with connectivity for their services. While I would love to think that this will improve connectivity down there to Europe etc. I'm skeptical because it's Google.
This cable has a design capacity of ~320Tbps with 16 fiber pairs. The previously announced transatlantic cable, Dunant cable has 12 fiber pairs and a 250Tbps design capacity. These values could probably increase to around 480Tbps and 360Tbps with more advanced optical transmission equipment.
> Once complete, Equiano will start in western Europe and run along the West Coast of Africa, between Portugal and South Africa, with branching units along the way that can be used to extend connectivity to additional African countries.
I understand how undersea cables are laid, but how do you make use of a "branching unit" once it's at the bottom of the sea? Send down a submersible to plug in the branch? Lift the cable back up, plug in the branch, and lower it again? Do they lay the cable with patch leads attached to the branching units, so you just have to dredge those up and plug the rest of the branch in?
The Square Kilometre Array, on its initial phase, will have close to 200 dish radio telescopes and 130000 radio antennas working together in South Africa and Australia. The amount of data produced is predicted at 50% of all internet traffic (this was calculated 2 years ago, probably it changed a bit). A big part of that data will be distributed across the globe for science, being the main link originating in South Africa and ending up in Europe.
This will be the biggest scientific endeavor (by size) of mankind so far.
The Phase 2 of the SKA (for now just an idea), will increase the number of telescope dishes and antennas by a factor of 10.
It's funded by Google completely according to TFA, and it's filed under "Infrastructure - Google Cloud Platform" - I'd hazard a guess that it's probably just for Google Cloud.
I wonder if this signals that Space/Balloon/Satellite Internet is too far away? Or maybe it's just worth doing this anyway because there's no risk of Kessler Syndrome under the sea.
Great to read this. I’ve Experienced problems when the WACs cable goes down so anything to improve comms is good by me. How much better is optical switching btw?
Surface distance Cape Town <-> London is 9673 km which corresponds to 33 ms rounded up at light speed (one way).
Surface distance Seattle <-> Berlin is 8143 km which corresponds to 28 ms rounded up at light speed (one way).
Now, these are distances when travelling across earth's curved surface. Neutrino canons or (quite impossible to ever build them) cables in earth's upper mantle would achieve even faster communication. Also, they correspond to direct connections and don't involve putting the cable into international waters far away from any government trying to get some extra bucks from you. The aerospace industry has to jump through a lot of hoops in order to be able to travel through airspace of a particular country.
Anybody remember Google Fiber? Makes you wonder if this may be hit with similar issues. IE: it takes longer than they anticipated, it costs more than anticipated etc..
