Laying Cable
August 12, 2023 10:53 AM Subscribe
There's only one internet, but strains can show when it connects countries that are at odds, for example when the Chinese government blocks Google and Facebook or US companies sever their connections to Russia's internet. These techno-political tensions have spread to the world of subsea cables. from The Secret Life of the 500+ Cables That Run the Internet
metalgearsolidalertsound.mp3 moment: Shannons everywhere twitching slightly when they get to the bit about the Shannon limit.
One of my fav tech tales is vaguely related to the subject of Internet cables (I think. Sir I am NOT a computer person.)
Can't send email more than 500 miles.
"He has to be able to solve it with his hand with string first, because we found the computer modeling never works."
Fascinating! I wish there was a whole nother article just about this.
posted by Baethan at 11:44 AM on August 12, 2023 [10 favorites]
One of my fav tech tales is vaguely related to the subject of Internet cables (I think. Sir I am NOT a computer person.)
Can't send email more than 500 miles.
"He has to be able to solve it with his hand with string first, because we found the computer modeling never works."
Fascinating! I wish there was a whole nother article just about this.
posted by Baethan at 11:44 AM on August 12, 2023 [10 favorites]
Here's a cable map that rather enjoy.
posted by calamari kid at 1:34 PM on August 12, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by calamari kid at 1:34 PM on August 12, 2023 [3 favorites]
Subsea cables are pretty tough, but every three days or so, one gets cut, TeleGeography said. The primary culprits, accounting for about 85% of cuts, are fishing equipment and anchors.
The natural predator of buried cable on land is the backhoe, often operated by people who don’t know or care that the cable is there. It’s interesting to see that subsea cables also have similar enemies!
posted by learning from frequent failure at 1:35 PM on August 12, 2023 [4 favorites]
The natural predator of buried cable on land is the backhoe, often operated by people who don’t know or care that the cable is there. It’s interesting to see that subsea cables also have similar enemies!
posted by learning from frequent failure at 1:35 PM on August 12, 2023 [4 favorites]
The natural predator of buried cable on land is the backhoe, often operated by people who don’t know or care that the cable is there. It’s interesting to see that subsea cables also have similar enemies!
Parallel evolution is not uncommon.
posted by hippybear at 2:51 PM on August 12, 2023 [6 favorites]
Parallel evolution is not uncommon.
posted by hippybear at 2:51 PM on August 12, 2023 [6 favorites]
Subsea cables are pretty tough, but every three days or so, one gets cut, TeleGeography said. The primary culprits, accounting for about 85% of cuts, are fishing equipment and anchors.
I was going to bring this up. Apparently they're basically constantly laying new cables as fast as they can as backups and replacements, even if they leave them dark just so they have new cables ready to go when something inevitably gets cut.
Another interesting historical sidebar is that before the discovery and use of gutta-percha as cable sealant and housing and that seawater actually hardens and cures it, they were trying to build a telegraph line to Europe from the US the long way over the Bering Strait and across Asia/Siberia, Russia and finally to the financial markets in London and Europe.
And it was a really close race. All bets were on the trans-Siberian route because all attempts at laying cable across the Atlantic kept failing. And I have NO IDEA how they were going to cross the Bering Sea and Strait.
This is interesting from a technology history standpoint because it's the original reason why the Seattle area was a hot spot of science and technology and having uncommonly high literacy rates for so long despite it being very much a remote frontier backwater. It wasn't Boeing or even Microsoft that was the first "tech"company in the area and the history goes all the way back to before Washington was even a state in the union.
When the first successful trans-Atlantic cables were laid and operational the trans-Siberian project collapsed in the late 1860s this left a bunch of telegraph engineers, linemen and related telegraph tech workers in the Seattle area, which later provided a steady pool of educated and skilled labor for companies like Boeing, and later, Microsoft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian%E2%80%93American_Telegraph
posted by loquacious at 3:30 PM on August 12, 2023 [22 favorites]
I was going to bring this up. Apparently they're basically constantly laying new cables as fast as they can as backups and replacements, even if they leave them dark just so they have new cables ready to go when something inevitably gets cut.
Another interesting historical sidebar is that before the discovery and use of gutta-percha as cable sealant and housing and that seawater actually hardens and cures it, they were trying to build a telegraph line to Europe from the US the long way over the Bering Strait and across Asia/Siberia, Russia and finally to the financial markets in London and Europe.
And it was a really close race. All bets were on the trans-Siberian route because all attempts at laying cable across the Atlantic kept failing. And I have NO IDEA how they were going to cross the Bering Sea and Strait.
This is interesting from a technology history standpoint because it's the original reason why the Seattle area was a hot spot of science and technology and having uncommonly high literacy rates for so long despite it being very much a remote frontier backwater. It wasn't Boeing or even Microsoft that was the first "tech"company in the area and the history goes all the way back to before Washington was even a state in the union.
When the first successful trans-Atlantic cables were laid and operational the trans-Siberian project collapsed in the late 1860s this left a bunch of telegraph engineers, linemen and related telegraph tech workers in the Seattle area, which later provided a steady pool of educated and skilled labor for companies like Boeing, and later, Microsoft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian%E2%80%93American_Telegraph
posted by loquacious at 3:30 PM on August 12, 2023 [22 favorites]
Wait, are you telling me that Microsoft is staffed with 19th C Telegraph operators? Were they somehow frozen and revived?
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:38 PM on August 12, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:38 PM on August 12, 2023 [2 favorites]
All the ones and zeros are hand crafted. It's a union job, and god bless 'em.
posted by hippybear at 4:44 PM on August 12, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by hippybear at 4:44 PM on August 12, 2023 [5 favorites]
A Western Union job.
posted by hippybear at 4:44 PM on August 12, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by hippybear at 4:44 PM on August 12, 2023 [4 favorites]
Previously there was a great post about some person in Chicago that found some High frequency trading transmitters - and it did make me think that there are publicized known routes, and many many unpublicized routes.
posted by mrzz at 4:48 PM on August 12, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by mrzz at 4:48 PM on August 12, 2023 [1 favorite]
and that'll coax more and more countries to join.
I stumbled over that a few times as read it as "coaxial cable" which 1) didn't make sense in the sentence, and 2) didn't make sense talking about modern fiber-optic cables.
posted by Ickster at 4:58 PM on August 12, 2023 [3 favorites]
I stumbled over that a few times as read it as "coaxial cable" which 1) didn't make sense in the sentence, and 2) didn't make sense talking about modern fiber-optic cables.
posted by Ickster at 4:58 PM on August 12, 2023 [3 favorites]
Couple of years ago went to Porthcurno , Cornwall and the Minack theater (really well done Romeo and Juliet) - and I just had to see the infrastructure for the trans-Atlantic cables. My party thought I was nuts, and they weren’t wrong - infrastructure is rarely a) noticeable and b) interesting (think about the thousands of miles of natural gas storage and how it gets from point A to point B). This type of infrastructure is kept on the down low - like the cables into Alexandria , Egypt.
posted by mrzz at 5:17 PM on August 12, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by mrzz at 5:17 PM on August 12, 2023 [3 favorites]
Mrzz, the previous post on High frequency trading on shortwave radio. Really great comments thread.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 9:01 PM on August 12, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 9:01 PM on August 12, 2023 [2 favorites]
infrastructure is rarely a) noticeable and b) interesting (think about the thousands of miles of natural gas storage and how it gets from point A to point B)
I once did work for a natural gas pipeline pumping station. That shit is wild, yo. It was out in the country and you would have no idea what is being done in the facility by looking at it. Not that is any sort of secret but why call attention to what you’re doing?
posted by Big Al 8000 at 9:12 PM on August 12, 2023 [1 favorite]
I once did work for a natural gas pipeline pumping station. That shit is wild, yo. It was out in the country and you would have no idea what is being done in the facility by looking at it. Not that is any sort of secret but why call attention to what you’re doing?
posted by Big Al 8000 at 9:12 PM on August 12, 2023 [1 favorite]
I once had a couple of weeks to myself with a 10Gb/s lambda from southern California to Australia to do testing and tuning of some data transfer nodes on both ends of the link. Was a lot of fun just thinking about it, sadly couldn't convince the Australians to install Quake III on their end and play a game or two... would have been interesting.
Regarding infrastructure and other cables... somewhere out in the middle of nowhere is a little cinder block shack beside a stretch of railroad track. Down below that is a mid sized room full of routers/switches/computers. Every time something breaks down there somebody has to fly out, rent a truck, and call the sheriff because to get to the shack you have to drive a mile or so across some angry farmers fields just to get there. I had to be very careful when upgrading network performance testing machines there. One wrong little typo and oh so much trouble to get if fixed.
posted by zengargoyle at 12:02 AM on August 13, 2023 [8 favorites]
Regarding infrastructure and other cables... somewhere out in the middle of nowhere is a little cinder block shack beside a stretch of railroad track. Down below that is a mid sized room full of routers/switches/computers. Every time something breaks down there somebody has to fly out, rent a truck, and call the sheriff because to get to the shack you have to drive a mile or so across some angry farmers fields just to get there. I had to be very careful when upgrading network performance testing machines there. One wrong little typo and oh so much trouble to get if fixed.
posted by zengargoyle at 12:02 AM on August 13, 2023 [8 favorites]
I've been on one of the ships that lays these cables, years ago. They are some bloody serious pieces of kit, with a lot of propellors all round the hull. The navigation system was supposed to be able to hold sea surface position to within a matter of meters in very inclement weather, if I'm remembering the pilot's spiel correctly. The cable ploughs (dunno if that's the technical term, was not speaking English with the crew) are monstrous as well. Their navigation computer ran Windows 3.11, despite this being well into the XP era, and had to use older processors because of a small maths bug in Pentium Pro and Pentium 2/3 CPUs? I may be misremembering that a little.
Anyway, those ships are cool and teenage me was overjoyed to have an opportunity to privately tour one, with a captain and pilot who were keen to show off to someone nerdy enough to actually care.
posted by Dysk at 12:17 AM on August 13, 2023 [12 favorites]
Anyway, those ships are cool and teenage me was overjoyed to have an opportunity to privately tour one, with a captain and pilot who were keen to show off to someone nerdy enough to actually care.
posted by Dysk at 12:17 AM on August 13, 2023 [12 favorites]
Couple of years ago went to Porthcurno , Cornwall and the Minack theater (really well done Romeo and Juliet) - and I just had to see the infrastructure for the trans-Atlantic cables.
So there is a Telegraph Museum there (which I guess you went to), that they used to sell as being key to the 'Victorian Internet'. You can see the cable coming up on to the beach. Essentially a comms node for the Empire from 1870 onwards.
posted by biffa at 1:26 PM on August 13, 2023
So there is a Telegraph Museum there (which I guess you went to), that they used to sell as being key to the 'Victorian Internet'. You can see the cable coming up on to the beach. Essentially a comms node for the Empire from 1870 onwards.
posted by biffa at 1:26 PM on August 13, 2023
Very cool to learn about these. Despite all the redundancies, those cables have to be super vulnerable in any conflict. So easy to disrupt and so difficult to fix in the middle of a war.
posted by dg at 5:17 PM on August 13, 2023
posted by dg at 5:17 PM on August 13, 2023
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