[HN Gopher] Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare
___________________________________________________________________
Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare
Author : pseudolus
Score : 85 points
Date : 2024-12-07 16:01 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Would Russia/China not also suffer quite a bit while the US would
| hardly notice compared to Europe? It seems not as effective as
| people think as a way to hurt America? Before long everything
| would be able to run independently/with large breaks anyway.
| zihotki wrote:
| They have their own more or less isolated segments of internet.
| Last week Russian agency regulating internet did a test in
| south areas and fully blocked the traffic to outside world so
| that telegram and VPNs were of no help
| fragmede wrote:
| I wonder what the backbone capacity of Starlink is.
| edm0nd wrote:
| There is no way a Starlink connection has the bandwidth of
| fiber. It's not backbone material.
| toast0 wrote:
| My impression is there aren't a lot of sites US users go to
| that are hosted outside the continental US. So in that way,
| you're right, cable cuts don't hurt that much. (Unless you're
| in Hawaii or Puerto Rico, or probably Alaska?)
|
| On the other hand, a lot of US based businesses work overseas
| with connections back to the US. Those businesses would likely
| be affected if there are major cable cuts, and hurting US
| businesses hurts the US in general.
|
| I ageee there's ways to make this work, but there would be
| significant disruption for quite some time as business adapts.
|
| China would likely be fine with fiber cuts. The GFW already
| limits access to the world at large and encourages local
| hosting. One of the techniques to discourage use of certain
| sites is random disruption, which trains the population to look
| for local sites when foreign sites don't work. Russia is
| pushing towards a more self-sufficient internet, but I don't
| think they're as far along, and I haven't heard of as much
| opaque coerciveness as in China, although I'm sure it's
| planned.
| WillyWonkaJr wrote:
| The trillions in daily financial transactions that cross the
| Atlantic via undersea cable is the main concern.
| blindriver wrote:
| It's impossible to protect these cables so the only thing you can
| do is build in massive redundancy. Strategically it is probably
| cheaper to lay down many dozens of these cables in different
| locations than expect to protect them
| ksec wrote:
| But I assume layering cable is not a one time cost right? There
| should be some operation cost involved? Such as maintenance?
|
| I am still hoping sometime we could have massive amount of
| hollow fibre undersea cable to reduce latency between different
| continents.
| haneefmubarak wrote:
| Operational costs (outside of repairing cuts) round to zero
| in comparison to the capital costs of laying the initial
| cable. There are OLD cables that are still active, despite
| relatively low bandwidth, because going and disconnecting
| everything on either end (even though the cable would remain
| there) is considered an additional unnecessary cost.
| anttihaapala wrote:
| If you consider an underwater cable running from Finland to
| Germany or Sweden to Lithuania in the Baltic Sea, it is
| virtually impossible for a ship travelling from St. Petersburg
| to the Kattegat to avoid passing over it, so redundancy can do
| only that much there.
| logicchains wrote:
| Maybe a stupid question, but is it possible to run a power
| cable next to the internet cables, so any ship dragging its
| anchor over the cables gets a rude surprise? Or that wouldn't
| work underwater?
| Etheryte wrote:
| That wouldn't do anything, you'd just be sending it
| straight to ground.
| diggan wrote:
| > If you consider an underwater cable running from Finland to
| Germany or Sweden
|
| Well, if you only think about direct links, then yes. But run
| 5 cables up and down the coasts of Sweden<>Finland, then also
| for Sweden<>Germany, Denmark<>Sweden and Denmark<>Germany and
| you start having a lot of redundancy.
|
| Of course, that also adds a lot of ongoing costs for
| infrastructure, monitoring and maintenance, so not a silver
| bullet exactly.
| mrandish wrote:
| Agreed, but at the same time it would also be worthwhile to
| look at ways to increase our detection and policing of shipping
| around these cables. I'm no expert but I imagine there are ways
| to speed up naval reaction times, tighten penalties for ships
| going dark (transponder off) and set new policy norms enabling
| rapid investigation.
|
| Basically things that make it harder for bad actors to maintain
| plausible deniability. So far, a lot of this has been done with
| relatively low cost and low risk for the perpetrators. The fact
| this Chinese ship was chased down and stopped before getting
| too far away was actually pretty lucky. If we formalize new
| systems and policies to ensure the instant a cable is cut there
| are navy ships converging on suspect ships - that will shift
| the cost calculus of the bad guys. If every cable attack
| requires a special submarine deploying a demolition team
| underwater near the target, it gets a lot more expensive and if
| caught there's little deniability.
|
| If these kinds of attacks continue then I expect we'll see some
| extra-judicial direct action consequences imposed. Like a ship
| that gets away later having a mysterious accident causing it to
| slowly sink in deep water (thank goodness another passing ship
| was nearby to rescue the crew!). While I don't like it, when
| bad actors figure out a way to repeatedly avoid consequences,
| sometimes a little rule bending is needed.
| amelius wrote:
| I suspect the reaction time loses importance if the enemy can
| just attach an explosive payload with a timer.
|
| But perhaps it is somehow detectable.
| mrandish wrote:
| Yes, there may be no way to avoid it turning into another
| cycle of measures vs counter-measures. The important thing
| is to increase the costs and difficulty for the bad guys
| while decreasing the disruption caused by attacking one
| cable.
| nradov wrote:
| Attaching an explosive to an undersea cable requires
| trained divers or an ROV, plus at least a little bit of
| specialized equipment and a few hours to work. It can be
| done but it's a lot harder than just dragging an anchor.
| geepytee wrote:
| On the transponders off point, I imagine soon we will have
| enough satellites such that we can map every object on the
| surface of the earth (specially something as large as a
| boat).
|
| Could even see it through clouds using radar.
| preisschild wrote:
| The soviets did exactly that so they can attack large US
| convoys with long-range Anti-Ship Missiles
|
| They had to use a fission reactor onboard those satellites
| to power the radar array
|
| It consisted of 2 satellite types. US-A (active) and US-P
| (passive). US-A used radar and US-P used passive antennas
| so they can "see" signals from ships.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A
|
| Late Cold War AShM's (SS-N-19 Shipwrecks) could use those
| satellites directly to update the target location in-flight
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legenda_(satellite_system)
| lxgr wrote:
| The seas are vast. If it were that easy to combat bad actors
| with strong military presence, piracy wouldn't have been an
| issue for as long as it has been.
| gruez wrote:
| >The fact this Chinese ship was chased down and stopped
| before getting too far away was actually pretty lucky.
|
| Were they actually stopped? The linked Reuters article only
| says:
|
| "The ship now sits idle in international waters but inside
| Denmark's exclusive economic zone, closely watched by Danish
| military vessels."
|
| which makes it sound like it stopped of its own accord. It's
| also uncertain what, if anything Denmark or Sweden could do
| if it decided to bail.
| mrandish wrote:
| > Were they actually stopped?
|
| I think the broad, practical answer to that is 'almost
| certainly'. I'm pretty sure if warships hadn't shown up and
| asked to come over and have a chat, the ship wouldn't still
| be sitting there. There's also probably a very technical
| legal answer which may indicate they weren't "stopped" at
| all based on the precise wording actually communicated and
| relevant maritime law.
|
| Interestingly, a long time ago I got to experience being on
| a freighter in the South China Sea and having some sizable
| Singapore navy warships pull up and ask to have a chat and
| take a look around. Warships pulling up at sea certainly
| has a way of commanding your undivided attention. It's like
| being pulled over by a cop, except the cop is heavily armed
| commandos in an Apache attack helicopter.
|
| I suspect the only reason the navy hasn't boarded that ship
| yet is because the captain is being ordered to stonewall by
| the owners and the government would prefer to avoid
| breaking maritime law (especially with everyone paying
| attention). However, if the relevant governments determine
| there's sufficient value in searching the ship, they'll
| just have their maritime lawyers come up with the best
| excuse or "exigent circumstances" pretense they can and
| board anyway.
|
| The ship I was on was flying a Liberian flag but Indonesian
| owned. Given that we were in international waters and these
| guys weren't even customs, police or port authority (who
| are the dudes who usually pull over freighters), the
| captain could have technically denied their request but he
| didn't even consider it. He later told me, basically, if
| you are not 'the droids they're looking for' then you let
| them the fuck on board. As a commercial hauler there's
| simply no upside to making trouble for the Navy, they have
| a lot of ways to ruin your day and you might someday need
| their help if you've got an emergency (or pirates chasing
| you, which is not impossible in those waters). The only
| freighter captains who insist on exercising their rights
| under maritime law when facing a naval warship typically
| have a political motivation or maybe are actually pirates,
| spies or smugglers (of weapons or people - warships don't
| give a fuck about that undeclared container of stereos).
| Naval warships (at least in that area) also don't usually
| care much about expired paperwork, lapsed passports or even
| outstanding warrants. They aren't law enforcement and a
| warship like that costs over a million dollars a day to
| keep at sea. They are there under national command
| authority for reasons that are way above a freighter
| captain's pay grade. The captain and crew are usually just
| contractors hired to drive the ship. Our captain had been
| at sea 15 years and that was the first time he'd ever had a
| naval warship pay any attention to him.
| cjblomqvist wrote:
| As far as I'm aware, the ship still also have to go
| through the strait between Sweden/Denmark (or through
| pure Danish territory) to reach the Atlantic ocean, so
| there are plenty of waters ahead where these governments
| very well could do more if economic waters it's not
| enough.
|
| So that probably also helps with not wanting to just
| escape. Where it's now it can at least escape through
| international water all the way to Russia if it wants to.
|
| To me it feels like it's stuck between a hard rock and a
| stone...
| d3VwsX wrote:
| I can not find any recent updates, but this one (from
| 29/11, in Swedish) mentions ongoing discussions with
| China making progress on reaching an agreement to allow
| the Swedish navy to board the ship:
|
| https://www.svt.se/nyheter/utrikes/kina-redo-att-
| samarbeta-o...
| fpoling wrote:
| One ship with an anchor on the bottom can destroy 100 cables
| just as well as one.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| You can also do the extra work to bury the cable.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Probably impractical. Digging underwater is much harder
| than carefully lowering something on the floor.
| raelming wrote:
| There's already underwater powered trenching/laying
| equipment they use to bury the cables within X miles from
| the shore. The Baltic Sea is probably shallow enough to
| bury it all the way across at a higher cost per mile of
| course.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| They have a handy tool for it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipe-and-cable-
| laying_plough
| Aloisius wrote:
| The C-Lion1 cable that was cut was reported buried 1 meter
| below the seabed.
|
| Unfortunately, that wasn't deep enough since heavy ship
| anchors which can dig in deeper than that.
| in_a_society wrote:
| I wonder if the cable could be enclosed in some sort of
| container whose shape would make an anchor glance off its
| surface.
| munch117 wrote:
| The cables are a lot thinner than you think. Such casing
| would vastly add to their bulk - and their cost.
| kouru225 wrote:
| I remember reading that the early telegram adopters were really
| surprised that no one destroyed the lines just for fun. They all
| thought it was a doomed technology cause the masses would
| sabotage it. TBH we've been pretty lucky for the last 2
| centuries.
| ronsor wrote:
| Why was it so surprising? Society as a whole is only functional
| because most people are uninterested in causing mayhem for no
| reason.
| the_af wrote:
| Vandalism of public phones (when they existed) was pretty
| common in my city. And garbage bins in public spaces get
| destroyed all the time for no reason. Everything that isn't
| nailed down and very robust gets destroyed or stolen.
|
| Infrastructure things related to water pipes (at the
| buildings level) gets stolen, too (happened in my building
| recently). Everything that can be resold as raw materials
| gets stolen.
| compootr wrote:
| For a cable at the bottom of the ocean, there is a barrier
| to entry though. For theft in the city, the thing being
| stolen is pretty easily accessible, and requires much less
| thought than getting some kind of submersible and going to
| the bottom of the ocean
| the_af wrote:
| Definitely. I was only discussing the telegraph and its
| skeptics.
| grapesodaaaaa wrote:
| The egress/ingress points can sometimes be accessible by
| shore, but the cables I have seen there are pretty
| heavily armored (likely just the same type used to armor
| against ship anchors)
| diggan wrote:
| > The egress/ingress points can sometimes be accessible
| by shore, but the cables I have seen there are pretty
| heavily armored
|
| I think the cables are of variable thickness. Thicker at
| the shore and in areas there is higher risk for damage
| because of rocks etc, and thinner where it's deeper and
| flatter.
| dingnuts wrote:
| this is cultural. not every city is as you describe
| the_af wrote:
| Oh, I'm aware it's cultural.
|
| I was just arguing it wasn't unreasonable for telegraph
| skeptics to believe vandalism would be common.
| mmooss wrote:
| The second statement is true; the first is not
| necessarily the reason.
| samatman wrote:
| Seems tautologically true to me. Culture covers a lot of
| ground. Like saying "cities have a lot of people for
| urban reasons".
| jpcom wrote:
| Does your city have those scooters that people ride without
| helmets at great speeds?
| the_af wrote:
| We used to, briefly. It was a failed experiment (not sure
| if they stole them, though I guess some were stolen).
|
| We still have bikes though.
| vasco wrote:
| Because it takes 1 person, in an isolated spot to ruin a
| whole chunk of a network. Even though society as a whole
| works, there's things where one person can easily mess it up
| for potentially millions of people. So even if that person
| would have to be a big statistical anomaly, they'll exist.
| ajross wrote:
| > Because it takes 1 person, in an isolated spot to ruin a
| whole chunk of a network.
|
| In point of fact no chunks of the network were ruined at
| all. Dynamic routing was a design point way back when DARPA
| funded IPv4, and for _exactly_ this reason.
| samatman wrote:
| The topic was the telegraph network, which did not have
| that property.
| ajross wrote:
| Uh... no? The _topic_ is "undersea internet cables",
| it's right there at the top of the page. It's true this
| subthread became a digression about telegraphs, and I
| thought it was important to bring things back to the
| actual subject being discussed, as it doesn't share the
| property that made telegraph sabotage a notable idea.
| mmooss wrote:
| > Because it takes 1 person ...
|
| It turns out that _empirically_ , in every area, such '1
| person' risks are very low, even though _theoretically_ it
| sometimes seems likely to us.
|
| For some reason we often theorize, we imagine the world, as
| if homo sapiens are sociopaths. There's also a
| political/social movement (or set of movements) that
| require that to be true, and insist on it. In reality, it
| is very much against our nature to do such things. We are
| social creatures that live in groups and work together, and
| have been for millions of years. That's how we survive and
| thrive.
|
| It would take '1 person' to drive their car over a busy
| sidewalk or to push you into traffic, but I don't worry
| about it when I'm waiting to cross a busy street. It would
| take one to poison your dinner or push you off a cliff when
| hiking or set a bear trap in a park ... . You can come up
| with endless scenarios. (And yes, with 7+ billion people in
| the world, even with very low odds you can find examples.)
|
| Come to think of it, I can't think of other animals that do
| such things either, including non-social animals.
|
| Almost everything we do, we do in groups trusting each
| other. It's deeply ingrained human nature.
| kylecazar wrote:
| The book kiosk in my town had a leave-one take-one
| program that was suspended because a local stole all 40+
| books to sell on Amazon.
|
| Also, no more nativity scene at the church because they
| steal the baby Jesus.
| mmooss wrote:
| Things happen, but there are still nativity scenes and
| book kiosks all over the place that work fine.
| lxgr wrote:
| > Because it takes 1 person, in an isolated spot to ruin a
| whole chunk of a network.
|
| If that were true, we'd see a lot more sabotage.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If that were true, we'd see a lot more sabotage_
|
| It is true. There is a lot of critical infrastructure out
| in the open that a dude with a pick-up truck of
| fertiliser could trash. (I'm not even getting to our
| electrical or natural gas distribution systems.)
| lxgr wrote:
| I don't doubt that for critical infrastructure in
| general, but telecommunication infrastructure in
| particular seems redundant enough to be resilient against
| physical layer attacks of that kind.
|
| The last mile usually isn't, but recent events have shown
| that even cutting several cables doesn't have any
| noticeable impact on international traffic patterns:
| https://blog.cloudflare.com/resilient-internet-
| connectivity-...
|
| I'm actually much more concerned about e.g. a logical
| attack against Cloudflare, which could actually bring
| down tons of services globally.
| XorNot wrote:
| I mean shooting electricity transformers turns out to be
| pretty viable, it's just got the basic problem of (1) you
| probably need that electricity yourself and (2) while it
| might be hard to prevent, catching the guys who did it is
| a lot easier and no one wants to do 12+ months in prison.
| dole wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
|
| it's been 10 years, and you think it'd be easier to catch
| someone in manhattan in this day and age but things fall
| through the cracks. I hope satellite surveillance
| advances to protect infrastructure assets but there's
| really only so much unknown you can protect yourself
| from.
| buckle8017 wrote:
| Fortunately the people wanting to do that are often to
| stupid to realize what's vulnerable.
| dylan604 wrote:
| well, a more charitable take on it would be they just
| don't have the means to achieve what they might want to
| do. would you be able to charter a boat with the ability
| of cutting the cables while also ensuring that whatever
| crew you hired will be complicit with your task? make it
| more simple you say by finding where the cables come on
| land and attack them there is more complicated because
| now you're on foreign soil.
|
| so does that make someone stupid because they're not an
| evil billionaire and just someone that likes to watch the
| world burn?
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > well, a more charitable take ...
|
| One of the main reason the very few manages to ruin
| cities for everyone else is because of the charitable
| take.
|
| In addition to that, just like GP, my experience is that
| the people being nuisance are really just stupid. I
| haven't seen many chess IMs nor many engineers destroying
| things the majority relies on just for fun.
|
| There's zero reason to be charitable with dumb people
| acting evil and there's zero reason to attribute
| intelligence where there's typically close to none.
| card_zero wrote:
| They _are_ thin on the ground, so far I could only find
| Norman T. Whitaker, who did a lot of insurance fraud and
| various kinds of swindle and was prison friends with Al
| Capone.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_T._Whitaker
| croissants wrote:
| This is the thing that actually worries me the most about
| AI. Right now there are meaningful practical obstacles
| to, say, manufacturing ricin or 3-D printing a working
| gun or figuring out how to kill somebody with a drone,
| and apparently these practical obstacles are enough to
| deter a nutso but insufficiently
| committed/intelligent/methodical would-be assassin, but
| if you have a chatbot that will happily talk you through
| the whole process, maybe that equilibrium changes.
| vkou wrote:
| The chatbot can't even give me a code sample which
| doesn't hallucinate APIs - something that is easily
| machine-verifiable.
|
| Asking it to do something complicated that's not machine
| verifiable and expecting it to be correct is science
| fiction.
| shahzaibmushtaq wrote:
| We need a new global policy that is signed by every country (if
| it is possible) to protect undersea internet cables.
| sschueller wrote:
| Like the ICC? Doesn't work if some countries think it does not
| apply to them when it's inconvenient.
| from-nibly wrote:
| It's not already a policy to not break other peoples things?
| drsim wrote:
| We have the Convention for the Protection of Submarine
| Telegraph Cables from 1884. Doesn't appear to have been needed
| until now so is relatively untested.
| mrandish wrote:
| It would be literally impossible to get every country to even
| agree to a declaration that "warm puppies are good." Also, a
| lot of the shit countries do to each other is already
| explicitly against agreements they've signed.
|
| Sadly, geopolitics isn't a gentleman's club. It's a brutal dog-
| eat-dog brawl where those with enough military power pretend
| rules matter - until they don't. The UN doesn't (and can't)
| enforce anything. It just proclaims platitudes which are
| ignored when it comes to anything that matters to those with
| real power. I mean they let Saudi Arabia chair the humans right
| committee, so it's clearly a joke.
|
| Many countries ignore the International Criminal Court when it
| suits them and most of the others who protest, would turn
| around and do the same if something that really matters to
| their domestic power centers happens. The ICC is useful for
| dealing with regional warlords and criminals who don't have (or
| have lost) nation-state power. The criminals and warlords who
| do have nation-state power just ignore the ICC and the clever
| ones use the ICC to deal with domestic enemies when it's
| convenient. Unfortunately, respecting some ideal of
| international law or norms is a polite fiction for school
| children and the gullible.
| mmooss wrote:
| For some reason people on HN imagine that, but it's not how
| it works in reality.
|
| There are many, many international agreements - decades and
| in some cases centuries of them - that are effective, and new
| ones all the time. The UN Security Council has great power -
| that is why countries work so hard to promote or defeat
| Security Council decisions.
|
| The ICC has been effective - warlords know that they can, in
| many cases in wartime, murder people with impunity, and in
| the past that was the end of it. But now they know that will
| be liable forever after, subject to arrest, trial and
| imprisonment, branded an international criminal, and unable
| to travel to ICC signatory states or (I think) to do business
| there.
|
| No law or system of laws is perfect. Everywhere, some escape
| them, some manipulate them. But it's not 100% or 0%; the
| standard is not perfection or a complete waste - otherwise
| everything humanity does is a complete waste.
|
| But everything depends on you (and me). Do we find ways to
| make it better, or just idly tear it down? Sitting on the
| sideline and complaining has become a normal behavior, but
| there is nobody else - nobody is on the field, except some
| very bad people.
| croissants wrote:
| > For some reason people on HN imagine that
|
| It's an easy simplifying heuristic to suppose that
| countries are all self-interested and nobody actually cares
| about "norms" or "war crimes" or "not filling low-orbit
| space with satellite fragments", because you get to forget
| about a lot of context and motivations and just put on your
| game theory hat and go, but like most simplifying
| heuristics that make things cleaner to think about, the
| conclusions this leads you to should be taken with a grain
| of salt
| gehsty wrote:
| That's like saying we need a policy where every country agrees
| to be friends. If cables are cut as part of some clandestine
| operation by who evers security forces, they aren't going to
| stop it because of some treaty.
|
| (There are all ready guidelines from ICPC on cable protection
| design, cable crossings etc)
| ajross wrote:
| Worth pointing out that articles like this _were the goal_ of the
| sabotage. It makes Russia 's[1] influence look outsized and
| threatening and is designed to increase the perceived costs of a
| strained relationship with Putin.
|
| But... it's shortsighted and wrong. Cables are cheap, as
| infrastructure goes, and the global internet is _extremely_
| robust. Yeah yeah, they cut two cables. How many Finns or
| Estonians had to go without their Netflix? None, because the
| network just[2] routed around the damage.
|
| [1] Yes yes, we don't know for sure it was Putin and probably
| never will. But it's everyone's prior at this point and it will
| remain so, which is really my point.
|
| [2] Literally! The phrase is a cliche for a reason. It works.
| gradientsrneat wrote:
| The article says it was likely a Chinese vessel, and a previous
| series of cable cuts affecting European internet was attributed
| to a Muslim terrorist organization. It's not just one country
| cutting cables, and there are multiple motivations
| geopolitically.
| ajross wrote:
| It was a "chinese" vessel in the sense of registration. It
| wasn't operating at the behest of the PRC government. Nor,
| obviously, would one expect _literal espionage_ to be carried
| out only by identifiable government vessels of the nation
| doing the operation.
|
| The really-quite-soundly-grounded consensus is that Russian
| spies rented this boat. But yes, that's not proven.
| keybored wrote:
| Russia is both a puny country with a GDP the size of Italy and
| a country that could invade all its neighboring countries if
| given the tiniest chance.[1] Both of these things are said here
| in the West.
|
| [1] Of course GDP in terms of international purchasing power
| isn't the be-all-end-all for supplying your own military
| domestically. But people say the part about GDP as if Russia is
| nothing.
| aguaviva wrote:
| _Both of these things are said here in the West._
|
| Except they're not. No one says Russia is a "puny country",
| or that it could "invade all its neighboring countries"
| (which would have to include, for example, China).
|
| You're definitely making some weird exaggerations here.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Can someone explain this excerpt to me?
|
| _NATO is currently investigating future internet backup routes
| through satellites in the case of undersea cable failures. But
| that technology is only in a preliminary, proof-of-concept stage
| and may be many years from real-world relevance._
|
| We already have satellite links and can configure our networks to
| route through them when a primary route disappears. Why are they
| saying this is "future tech"?
|
| Are they talking about backups at a bulk backbone level for which
| we simply don't have enough satellite capacity?
| jballer wrote:
| Probably challenging to sufficiently harden the links and
| ground equipment, and to guarantee QoS for military
| applications
| Etheryte wrote:
| These cables offer enough bandwidth to service an entire
| country and then some, because they're also passing along data
| coming from further on. We have no satellites that can offer
| anything close to that rate.
| vitiral wrote:
| IIRC starlink might try
| diggan wrote:
| > Why are they saying this is "future tech"?
|
| I read it like "we're doing proofs of concepts but it'll take
| some years before it's production ready", not some wishy washy
| "future tech". It's in the pipeline, just that the pipeline
| takes some time.
| toast0 wrote:
| Capacity is the issue. Undersea cables typically have terrabits
| per second of capacity. Newer cables are hundreds of tbps.
|
| Satellites just don't have that kind of capacity at this point.
| Certainly, you can aggregate several satellites, and you may
| get to enough capacity for your needs, but it will be a lot
| less capacity than a cable and you may need to have significant
| usage restrictions in one form or another.
| bobbob1921 wrote:
| I would think for longer run cables, a majority of the run is at
| a depth, such that anchors don't even go that deep (except once
| you get closer to land/shore ) I wonder how far into the seafloor
| you have to bury a cable such that it's beyond How deep an anchor
| can reasonably penetrate (even if the anchor is being dragged).
| I'm sure this adds quite a bit of cost to the fiber run anywhere
| you have to bury it, however, I know I've seen systems that use a
| sled and water jets down on the sea floor to bury the cable as
| it's run.
| dylan604 wrote:
| They call it "an anchor", but could it not be a tool designed
| for purpose that only resembles an anchor in the fact that it
| connects to the ship while sitting on the ocean floor? We are
| talking about hostile nation states and not some fishing crew
| amelius wrote:
| Maybe Europe just needs a bunch of tunnels like the Channel
| tunnel, and then add some fiber to it.
| graeme wrote:
| Is there a way as a north american business to check if your site
| or tools have any non north american dependencies reliant on
| undersea cables?
| Animats wrote:
| Cables can be buried in trenches in the ocean bottom. There are
| cable plows for this. [1] They're huge and slow. Undersea power
| cables are routinely buried, but comm cables are only buried near
| shore.
|
| The downside of cable burial is that repair is harder.
|
| [1] https://www.smd.co.uk/category/trenching/
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