[HN Gopher] The race to reconnect Tonga
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The race to reconnect Tonga
Author : jonathan-adly
Score : 68 points
Date : 2022-02-14 14:50 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (graphics.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (graphics.reuters.com)
| pchristensen wrote:
| If you find this at all interesting, you have to read Neal
| Stephenson's classic Wired article about undersea cables -
| https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Came here to post that, great minds think alike!
| zeeb wrote:
| Ditto; great article.
| irrational wrote:
| Thanks for posting this. What a fascinating read.
|
| > one early inventor wanted to use 26-wire cables, one wire for
| each letter of the alphabet.
|
| I'd love to know how he thought that would work. How did he
| plan on knowing the order of the letters? What about spaces and
| other punctuation?
| WJW wrote:
| The way I'd do it would be to have a big 26-light display,
| each corresponding to one letter. Then you'd light them up
| one at a time and have the receiving clerk write down the
| letters one by one. Efficient? Not very, but I can see how
| someone without a lot of information theory knowledge (as
| almost all early inventors would be) would land on that idea
| first.
| divbzero wrote:
| The article can also be found in _Some Remarks_ [1], a
| collection of his essays and short fiction.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_Remarks
| c54 wrote:
| Always impressed by the amount of engineering which goes into the
| undersea cables and into fiber optic connections in general. One
| interesting takeaway (at the risk of mentioning an elon company)
| is that current-gen satellite connectivity will be massively
| improved by constellations like Starlink, providing a really nice
| option to disaster zones and places where normal physical
| connectivity is interrupted.
|
| We might even see reduction of dependence on undersea cables in
| general, which seems good considering the passages on fishing,
| seafloor disruption, and the whole bit about "uhh yeah
| _sometimes_ these cables are salvaged... "
|
| I am curious about the effects on deep sea marine biology in
| sensitive areas... most of the ocean floor is desert, but do we
| have total knowledge about all the places these cables are going
| through? By fishing activity are we talking about deep sea
| trawling? The presence of fishing activity implies at least the
| non-sea-bed areas are in fact not deserted.
| hermitdev wrote:
| From the article, sounds like their currently contracted
| satellite connections are having trouble due to lingering
| volcanic ash. Would Starlink fare any better against volcanic
| ash?
| ncmncm wrote:
| The assumption is always that the deep sea bottom is a desert,
| but everywhere anybody looks, anywhere, they always find
| something living there.
|
| That said, the amount of cabling is actually very small vs. the
| size of the ocean, which is bigger than anybody can really
| comprehend.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| I'm surprised how much you seem to worry about ecological
| impact of deep sea cables... Are there _that_ many? And even if
| each one were a complete disaster all the way (which seems
| virtually impossible), it would be... like a one meter strip
| across the entire ocean that is affected, out of 2500 km?
|
| Could you elaborate what impact you are concerned about?
| throw0101a wrote:
| Richard Steenbergen regularly gave/gives a presentation called
| "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Optical" at NANOG:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKeZaNwPKPo
|
| This is fibre optics in general. For long distance stuff (>40km)
| you want to do a search for "coherent optics". A lot of these
| long distance fibres have multiple signals going down one glass
| using different colours ("lambdas") which are (de)muxed; see
| Dense Wave Division Multiplexing:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dum8UXtbN3o
| aaron695 wrote:
| Since last time this article was discussed RE: Starlink
|
| > No ground station near by - https://starlink.sx/
|
| > No lasers online -
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1482424984962101249
|
| Starlink is going to put in a ground station -
| https://au.pcmag.com/networking/92316/spacexs-starlink-worki...
|
| How the cable might break, obviously the pretty small explosion
| wouldn't break a cable but it might have been the same probable
| cause of the tsunami, a landslide (which has a lot of energy) -
|
| Insights into submarine geohazards from breaks in subsea
| telecommunication cables -
| https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2014.40.
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