(Page 3 of 3)
"We have planned for circumstances like these," says Nathan Linkon, a spokesman for Infosys, a large Bangalore-based outsourcing company. "We have diversity in path and providers, and we haven't lost any connectivity to our offices or customers."
With just two cables at issue, restoring service is expected to go more smoothly than did the 49-day process required after the Taiwan earthquake. Flag Telecom has told its customers that a repair ship that launched from Catania, Italy, will arrive and begin work today. The company said that Egyptian authorities are "expediting the permits" so that work can begin as soon as the ship arrives.
These repair operations have become fairly routine, with marine service companies on call around the world to launch a ship as quickly as possible when a nearby cable has been torn by a ship's anchor or fishing net, or, more unusually, by a natural event such as an earthquake.
A repair ship will typically take several days to reach the site of a break, says Stephen Scott, commercial manager for the U.K.-based Global Marine Systems, which is not involved in fixing this week's break.
A ship will locate the break in the line, sometimes by using a remote-controlled submarine device that can send signals up and down the cable, Scott says. The cable is then cut entirely at the break, and the little sub brings one half to the surface. Alternately, some operations simply use long grappling hooks to grab the cable.
Once the first half is brought to the surface, the crew splices on a long segment of replacement cable. The first half is let back to the sea floor; the other broken half is brought to the top, and the other end of the replacement cable is spliced on.
Unless the seas are rough, this double-splicing operation can take about 20 hours from start to finish, Scott says.
In the wake of the fiber breaks, Perhar says that his organization is encouraging ISPs and companies dependent on fast connections to continue diversifying their bandwidth sources as much as possible, and to lobby for new cable to be laid.
Telegeography Research counts at least four new fiber lines planned for the Europe-Egypt route over the next few years, including another by Flag Telecom, one by Telecom Egypt, another by the Egypt-based Orascom Telecom, and a fourth funded by the India-Middle East-Western Europe consortium of companies.
But even these will all use roughly the same route, says analyst Strong. That will keep this Mediterranean zone a "choke point" worth watching.
"With more cables, it's getting better over time," Strong says. "But there will still be a lack of physical, geographical redundancy. That is something of a concern."
The most notorious promoter of the 1990s telecom boom has been proved right.
An academic internet provides clues about ways to improve the commercial Internet.
It seems rather crude to me that cables are being used at all. Satellites have been used for communications for so long now, why are such easily damaged items of hardware such as undersea cables even in existence anymore?
Fiber can handle much more bandwidth than satellite.
Fiber cables cam handle massively more data than satellites. Were the internet to rely on satellite technology we would still be living at dial up speeds.
If you use wireless communications, the various NSA collecting stations around the globe will scoop up wholesale amounts of these communications for their spying purposes. This is the reason more and more governments and organizations prefer to have cables. Cables can be hacked too, but it's a lot harder to do so.
Some people would say that these cable accidents were no accidents at all. Maybe some people have an interest to have communications shift towards satellites. Iran suffered the most outage from these cable cuts, and given all the war rhetoric going around...it doesn't take a genius to connect the dots.
Satellites are great for broadcast, mobile, temporary and "thin route" communications but they have far less capacity and cost more than modern fiber cables. Geostationary satellites introduce a delay that many find intolerable. Satellites in low earth orbit could avoid the delay problem, but this requires a large and expensive constellation to provide continuous coverage. Iridium and Globalstar were both financial failures.
Satellites also have their own failure mechanisms. The radio links can be jammed. Earth stations and satellites can both fail, and the latter are hard to repair. They also run out of stationkeeping fuel or just plain wear out and have to be periodically replaced.
Yes, redundancy & multiple paths are important! See this article from The Internet Protocol Journal on internet topology -- especially the parts on network resilience. Some structures are better than others.
Wireless internet by Satellite support as promising solution
Internet future is inclined to favor wireless connection through the support of satellites
as opposed to fiber lines.
As understandable as bandwith accomodation supports existing fiber application, material alteration,especially in satellite composition and design, could overcome any existing disadvantages, on the reasonableness
that, both risk and economic advantages support
wireless internet investment and eliminates any
long term failures, typical of the one in discussion.
Total wireless internet, replacing landline connection, is a dream that seems most
certain than probable.(martin@mpgatechnology.com)
Re: Wireless internet by Satellite support as promising solution
No matter how much you increase the bandwidth of satellite connections, they suffer from an inherent disadvantage - roundtrip latency of 72000 miles with geosynchronous orbits. This automatically precludes a lot of payloads - VoIP, video conferencing etc.
Re: Wireless internet by Satellite support as promising solution
Ha! Without a huge new constellation of low altitude satellites you'll never see it happen.
That is unless you've found a way to increase the speed of light. Current roundtrip latency from earth to satellites and back is almost 1000 milliseconds.
Imagine your ping times. That would all but destroy telephone/VOIP communications, online gaming, etc. Not to mention the incredibly reduced throughput because of the chatty nature of TCP.
A team of successful entrepreneurs credited for www.SelectWealthSystem.com
A new home-based-business marketing system that provides the strategic high ground for internet marketing.
Pro Team Marketing uses an automated marketing system that is currently promoting a cutting-edge young company, entering the early growth stage, that targets the largest consumer base in the United States with their financial educational products.
http://www.SelectWealthSystem.com
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
Our list of the 50 most innovative companies, including the following:
On Twitter
Become a Fan on Facebook
Subscribe to the Feed
jwoodside
6 Comments
seafloor variety
How careful are the cable laying companies in where they lay their cables? In my work as marine geophysicist I have come across cables in the most peculiar locations, where geology indicates potential natural risks to the cable. Seafloor is an active environment with considerable variability from one place to another. The Mediterranean certainly has a wide range of seafloor conditions and probably just as high a risk to cables from nature as from man.
Reply
KA9Q
2 Comments
Re: seafloor variety
According to the industry, they carefully plan routes to avoid shipping traffic and as much fishing as possible, and to follow the undersea topology. In shallow water, cables are armored and buried. The companies have detailed maps of where all the other cables are, and they're supposed to cross each other as close to a right angle as possible. They detect other cables by their magnetic fields, and they lift any burial ploughs when crossing them.
How well they actually do all this stuff is another question.
Reply
jwoodside
6 Comments
Re: seafloor variety
I use maps of cable locations when planning seafloor activities like dredging. What I was more curious about was cable company awareness of such active seafloor locations as black smokers and hydrothermal vents on mid ocean ridges or locations prone to large scale sediment slope failures (like on the Nile deep sea fan). We have seen cables in risky locations. I was just looking at a sonar image of a cable crossing directly over the peak (and centre of activity) of a large mud volcano in the Mediterranean.
Reply