Undersea Cables

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bry
  • Start date Start date
Some seriously long cables there! Must be incredibly difficult to lay as the required armoured cable will weight epic amounts at these lengths. I don't know how they do it really, it might be from huge boats dropping in in or something :confused:
 
The cable is dropped straight to the sea floor without any weights or additional protection. The only additional baggage is the optical signal amplifiers, of which 121 were used in the connection from Sydney to Hawaii, one every 75km.

The inner most layer is the fibre optic cable, which is surrounded by a steel sheath. This is in turn coated in a copper sheet, which carries 12 kilovolts of charge to power the optical amplifiers.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/com...e-optic-cable/0,139023754,339288061-3s,00.htm
 
I thought modern communication went through satellites, not through ancient copper telegraph cables :eek:.

If we really use these copper lines for Internet, they should replaced by proper fiber lines instead, should speed up the connection between the EU and the US, as atm the pings of +-100ms to the US are quite terrible.


EDIT: Ah so it are fiber optic cable's, oh well :(. So much for a faster connection to the America's.
 
norm said:
The cable is dropped straight to the sea floor without any weights or additional protection. The only additional baggage is the optical signal amplifiers, of which 121 were used in the connection from Sydney to Hawaii, one every 75km.

The inner most layer is the fibre optic cable, which is surrounded by a steel sheath. This is in turn coated in a copper sheet, which carries 12 kilovolts of charge to power the optical amplifiers.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/com...e-optic-cable/0,139023754,339288061-3s,00.htm
Click to expand...

hey mate, thanks for the extra information. Looking at those pics and wow. :)

As for still using cables and not satellites. I guess for the huge amount of data going around and considering a lot of it is time sensitive it is is probably cheaper and quicker to use cables. But, then again remember 12 months ago was it? When a undersea internet cable was cut and a lot of the middle east was without the internet/severely reduced speed
 
snowdog said:
I thought modern communication went through satellites, not through ancient copper telegraph cables :eek:.

If we really use these copper lines for Internet, they should replaced by proper fiber lines instead, should speed up the connection between the EU and the US, as atm the pings of +-100ms to the US are quite terrible.


EDIT: Ah so it are fiber optic cable's, oh well :(. So much for a faster connection to the America's.
Click to expand...

Doesn't everyone still have copper wires running into their homes though?

Even if you have fibre optics in your area (?) it won't for certain give you a faster connection if you still have copper going into your house.
 
Last edited:
Nice link! Optical cable certainly seems the best option going. I guess speed could be improved potentially by having more cables available for carrying the data, less "sharing" then.
 
Chimerical said:
Doesn't everyone still have copper wires running into their homes though?

Even if you have fibre optics along your street won't for certain give you a faster connection if you still have copper going into your house.
Click to expand...

The distance from your house to the fibre is short so you can increase the data rate as the section of copper cable with introduce only a small amount of noise (as it's short).
 
Satellite communication is slow mostly which is why these under seas lines are needed. The reason is, its a lot shorter distance to hop along an ocean than go to space and back a few times.
 
Chimerical said:
Doesn't everyone still have copper wires running into their homes though?

Even if you have fibre optics in your area (?) it won't for certain give you a faster connection if you still have copper going into your house.
Click to expand...

I mean the speed of the data, not the bandwith, from my house to the exchange is 8-12ms... I want to have a 30 ms ping on US servers like on Dutch servers... Or at least better than +-100ms.
 
snowdog said:
I mean the speed of the data, not the bandwith, from my house to the exchange is 8-12ms... I want to have a 30 ms ping on US servers like on Dutch servers... Or at least better than +-100ms.
Click to expand...

That's impossible though. Think of the distance involved here. Even for light to travel the 4000 miles across the Atlantic it still takes probably 80ms or so. The extra 20ms or so comes from the heavily loaded routers on either side.
 
Kemik said:
Wow! I thought they were a lot thicker than that. Why don't they make it thicker? I'd imagine it would mean more bandwidth.
Click to expand...

Thicker fibres can lead to problems with pluses broadening, a thicker core means that there are greater differences in the possible path the light can take through the core (think of the difference in length of a straight line right down the middle and a path that bounces off the sides of the core a lot). This can cause the light pulse to broaden (become longer) and means that receiving the message properly becomes harder (some pulses longer than others). There are probably loads of other reasons not to make them bigger but that's one of the reason I can remember from my brief foray into optical communications.
 
ive seen a programme about this.
also uni mate's dad works as a pilot on the oil ships that use drilling and long tubes....like straws i think.
Basically the pilot/captain on the shoft before him f-ed up and theres like a stupidly large amount of millions of dollars of the oil cable and drill lying on the sea bed near brazil or somewhere like that.....

crapstory i know.
 
There wouldn't be any sense in making individual strands of fibre optic thicker, you'd simply include more.

But improvements in technology have harnessed even more bandwidth from single fibre optic strands by using different parts of the light spectrum simultaneously. I don't know the current figures exactly, but say they used to be only good for 1Gbit/sec per strand, that's now been upgraded to 10Gbit/sec, with no change to the physical line.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom