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When A Cable Dies
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Jul 30, 2001 12:56 AM
from the of-australian-interest dept.
from the of-australian-interest dept.
highpingbastard writes: "Staff at Australian telecommunications carrier Telstra are going to hold a decomissioning ceremony for a 25-year-old voice and data cable spanning between Australia and New Zealand that died yesterday. Telstra was still using the 2Mbps cable as a backup circuit up until the time it was cut, probably by a ship's anchor. In general, undersea cables have a 25-year life span. A chance for all involved in the cable's long life to get closure. Australia's fastest looped network to the U.S., the (flash animation warning) Southern Cross Network Cable, also went down for 15 hours after it was snagged at the same time. It is supposed to have a 99.999 per cent network availability, or downtime amounting to 50 minutes over 10 years. Doh! That's 300 years' worth in one hit by my calculation ..."
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When A Cable Dies
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Obligatory Neal Stephenson link (Score:3)
Mandatory reading for N.S. fans.
Questions regarding "Redundancy & Survivability" (Score:3)
Last week a flaming train (but not a flaming goatse.cx ;-) brings down another internet in North America.
Still later this week, inbreeding amongst network capital equipment vendors leads to crippling genetic susceptibility to one breed of worms (another reason for having a "mutt" network vice a "purebreed" network???)
What good is all that profound " internet survivability " if all the pipes are laid down in the same trench, tunnel, manhole using the same vendor's gear???
Any Network Infrastructure Engineers care to clue us in to why the pipes get placed in the same geographic location (+/- 1000 m)???
Neal Stephenson Wired article on undersea cable (Score:3)
Use cables to find your way home (Score:5)
Big deal (Score:3)
In any other industry a 25-year old cable wouldn't be seen as anything special. Then again, I work for an electricity distributor, and routinely deal with cables laid 70 years ago, switches which could be sold as antiques and poles which are literally held up by the wires attached to them.
It must make things easier when you can actually talk to someone who was alive when the assets you're working on were installed.
The first undersea cable connection between Australia and New Zealand was commissioned on February 21, 1876.Is this a typo?
flash (Score:4)
Is it because they want to increase their pipe usage by feeding lots of useless crap over it?
TimC.
Re:Redundant... (Score:3)
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Were I in touch with the toilet that is humanity, I'd have flushed it long ago.
Repairs (Score:3)
_O_
Re:Big deal (Score:3)
If you think your Internet bandwidth and latency sucks, spare a thought for those using telegraph wires. The first transatlantic telegraph was sent from Newfoundland to Ireland in 1858: the message was 98 words long, and it took over 16 hours to send!
It's still broken, but they're redundant (Score:5)
The Southern Cross Cable is completely redundant, so they are justified in making their claims about uptime, but by some strange twist of fate, the second cable running out of Sydney was down for maintainance at the time of the break. The broken cable is still down [aarnet.net.au], and they simply brought the second cable back up to fix everything. In any case, it didn't stop Internet connectivity for Australian users as some posters are suggesting; ISPs routed traffic onto other cable/satellite links, and while it was slower for users affected, it wasn't like Australia suddenly became broken off from the rest of the world.
If you're interested about how they lay and fix these types of cable out at sea, you should read this great article from Wired in 19996 [wired.com] by Neal Stephenson. It takes a while to read, but it covers everything from the development of the technology, to installing and maintaining it, how it's all linked up, and the economics behind it.
Re:I've always wondered how they do that. (Score:5)
It then lies in a shallow trench which later fills up with sand to offer some protection. Not enough to stop a ships anchor by the looks. Once the water gets deeper though it has to be layed straight on the bottom.
I did the same thing... (Score:5)
Re:I've always wondered how they do that. (Score:3)
Try http://innovations.copper.org/1998april/cable_evol ution.htm [copper.org]. Or search Google for "underwater cable".
In the James Burke series, "The Day The Universe Changed", one episode includes a part on how the ship which was first used to lay trans-Atlantic cable ended up doing that (hint: it wasn't built for that). Of course, you could also go here: http://www.oldcablehouse.com/cablestations/history .html [oldcablehouse.com]. BTW, you can read James Burke "Connections" pieces at Scientific American (http://www.sciam.com [sciam.com] or in the magazine each month.
woof.
Quit all the whining about moderation! Don't like how it works? Tough. I don't like your variable declarations, but I'm not pissing about them, am I? Oh wait, I just did.
In related news.... (Score:5)
A bit of clarification... (Score:4)
A Telstra spokesman said today the link, laid "donkey's years ago", carried very little of the telco's network traffic before yesterday's cut.
This confused me, until I found the idiom [m-w.com].
(It wasn't here [dictionary.com] or here [everything2.com].)
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Rephrasing. (Score:4)
A Telstra spokesman confirmed today that a container ship at the focus of investigations behind the Southern Cross Cable cut yesterday also appeared to have caught the 25-year-old Tasman 1 cable linking Sydney with Auckland in New Zealand.
The 2Mbps link, which until Sunday was still used as a backup route across the Tasman Sea, has been decomissioned as repair costs outweigh the benefits of maintaining the link.
As previously reported, the "Southern Cross Cable" was cut yesterday, unintentionally.
However, another cable, a 25-year-old one linking Sydney, Australia with Auckland, New Zealand was also cut. It was a "Tasman 1" type cable.
The ship that is at the focus of authorities' investigations for the first cutting is apparently responsible for this second cutting also.
This is according to a Telstra spokesperson.
This second cut link was a 2Mbps link. It was still in use until it was accidentally cut, but only as a backup route. It goes across the Tasman Sea.
Since being cut, it was decided that the line would be not be repaired, since the benefits of maintaining the link aren't worth the high repair costs.
It is now being "posthumously" decomissioned with a celebration party.
Phew!
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Re:I've always wondered how they do that. (Score:3)
Of course, look while driving at your own risk - better yet, pull over on the shoulder before looking so you don't kill somebody :)
Re:Big deal (Score:3)
The first undersea cable connection between Australia and New Zealand was commissioned on February 21, 1876.
Is this a typo?
I don't think so - I believe it was a telegraph cable bound with tarred cloth. There is a brief mention of it here [stats.govt.nz].
My own underwater CAT-5 (Score:3)
The connection works great and now we have connected up three other neighboors as well. The most difficult part was getting the cable into the homes by drilling through wood and cement, but it wasn't that big of a deal. It's kind of cool -- and you don't even have to be a giant telecommunications company. Don't know if it's against our association rules, but I still enjoy my nightly Quake-over-lake game!
Re:Redundant... (Score:4)
I hate to break it to ya, bub, but all claims of "99.999%" reliability with physical devices are outlandish lies. I can't even claim 98% reliability with my own alarm clock; how am I supposed to do so with a bank of servers attached to the same line on the same power supply running the same OS with the same specialized code? 99.999% is a marketing lie -- the internet will never have complete reliability, because it is far too complex and has too many variables.
Your line that customers should sue for gaps in reliability is just selfish and silly. There was no way the company could have sped up the process, or they would have done so...I'm sure this was a terrible embarrasment. So if a group of customers were to file suit, this would be nothing more than a nuisance. Southern Cross didn't purposefully bring them down and they handled it as quickly as possible. A break in about 200 pieces of glass, each thiner than your hair and wrapper with insulant, jelly, 1/2 steel pipe and a copper conductor is not as easy as splicing two wires under a car hood -- a process which takes me about five minutes per wire.
The internet is a self switching entity tied to a scant few superfast backbones, and can never be 100% reliable. The trend towards claims that approach 100% is dangerous, because it causes investors and customers to see real claims (such as 98% reliability, or 100% during business hours, 96% after 7 pm) as underrated. And when you're looking for a host for your data, what's most important is the real uptime. Trying to find meaning in "99.999&" is like looking for the leprechaun in a box of Lucky Charms.
paint eyes on it (Score:5)
If nothing else, it might keep them busy enough to save a whale or two.