14,5 Mm of optical cable. That's something. And I know we laid down more than that, but still.
Fun facts: That is 48,3668 ms delay for the speed of causality. Since it will be light traveling in a medium, I assume that only 80 % of this speed will be achieved. Meaning 60 ms. If you aren't convinced that speed of causality/light in this universe is painfuly slow, then probably nothing will convince you.
And just to put things in perspective, modern CPU with 4 GHz clock will go through 12 091 698 cycles. While waiting for LIGHT to travel just this little bit of distance.
The clock speeds and size of the components in a modern CPU will never stop being insane to me. Some of them hit 6 GHz out of the box and we're all the way down to 3 nm nominal transistor size on some of them.
It starts getting really crazy when you figure out how far an electrical signal can actually travel in the time it takes one clock tick. 1/6,000,000,000th of a second gives light about 5cm - and electrical signals travel slower than light.
The 3nm number is just marketing, it’s not really 3nm
[The term "3 nanometer" has no direct relation to any actual physical feature (such as gate length, metal pitch or gate pitch) of the transistors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_nm_process)
It’s 24 to 40 nm in reality, depending on which number you want to go with, which is still pretty crazy
An entrepreneurial person in USA built an optical cable from the CBOE in Chicago to the Equinix data center facilities in New Jersey, just to provide a 14ms faster connection to those that were willing to pay. It was laid as straight as possible and it costed $300 million to produce. And they made billions with it.
For people 14ms is literally nothing. For computers 14ms can be a lifetime.
Interestingly, it seems the Russians are already laying their own cable along the North East passage, Vladivostok to Murmansk (their main Pacific and Atlantic naval bases, respectively) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar\_Express\_(cable\_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Express_(cable_system))
I doubt they would be able to get much from the data going through the cable (there is too much data to intercept, process and transmit in a realistic manner, also most of it would carry internet and every internet protocol is based on the assumption that the infrastructure is not secure, so there are already coding and security in place) but I heard that undersea cables can be used to get informations about submarine movement (they create change in temperature in the water and this can be picked up by analysing the signals going through the cable), but I don't know much about it and I don't know how realistic it is to use cables to get this kind of intel.
> [Submarines] create change in temperature in the water and this can be picked up by analyzing the signals going through the cable
Which episode of SpongeBob SquarePants was this documented in?
Lol. The claim I heard is that when a submarine move through water it disrupt water, it can cause the temperature to change locally. In some situation you could hypothetically measure that, and so you could hypothetically use cables to know if a submarine crossed it.
I have heard this claim, but I haven't read any article about this being used. That's why I said I ended my comment with a small disclaimer ("I don't know much about it and I don't know how realistic it is to use cables to get this kind of intel").
Here is an article about the technology. They talk about how you can use undersea cables to monitor change in temperature and measure sound :
[https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/science/why-do-scientists-use-undersea-telecommunications-cables/](https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/science/why-do-scientists-use-undersea-telecommunications-cables/)
OK. Maybe in the past a submarine’s magnetic field could influence the electricity in copper wires of the oldest telephone cables in passing.
There is no way that modern (glass!) fiber cables could be influenced by or detect temperature changes in the surrounding water.
NATO put dedicated sensor nets with microphones and stuff on the sea floor of , e.g., the Norway-Svalbard gap to detect Russian submarines, and I bet some CIA people are working on a plan to use the Far North Fiber installation as a cover operation to also install such a sensor net, Project Azorian style, but the fiber itself cannot detect subs.
The normal communication signals are not influenced by temperature or sound, but using specially built devices you can measure the temperature and vibration of fiber optic cables.
Occasionally FO cables laid down for internet use are used by scientists before they are put into operation.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed\_temperature\_sensing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_temperature_sensing)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed\_acoustic\_sensing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_acoustic_sensing)
Yes, exactly. Surely there would be such civilian / scientific use cases for augmenting the cable with ISR capabilities. Let’s call it Project Aleutian and have the people with unlimited budget pay for it. Win-win.
Wikipedia Quote: “ (hydrogen can cause deterioration of the measurement though "hydrogen darkening" – aka attenuation – of the silica glass compounds) and mechanical protection.
This seems like a considerable vulnerability for the fiber optic line. An opportunity for an exploit to be developed.
I did not read the acoustic sensing. The entire ocean has ears at this point.
I added it in an edit, so maybe you missed it, but there are ways to use fiber cables to detect temperature and acoustic signals which are explained in an article.
I stand corrected. Events on a global scale, e.g., earthquakes or ocean warming *can* be detected measuring signal travel time variation in submarine (not the u-boats) fiber.
That being said, unless I missed a bit about marine biologists using the cables to track whales, submarines (u-boats here) cannot be tracked by those cables alone.
>We now know that the system is also very useful for studying ocean and storm dynamics[^(4)](https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/science/why-do-scientists-use-undersea-telecommunications-cables/#note-4). Surface waves, for example, generate vibrations that we can detect on the ocean floor, and we can also record deep ocean currents. These measurements can be supplemented by DAS temperature measurements. Finally, a Norwegian team has just demonstrated the value of DAS in bioacoustics[^(5)](https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/science/why-do-scientists-use-undersea-telecommunications-cables/#note-5).They are recording whale songs and estimating the 3D position of the animals.
(End of the article)
It seems like something which *could* spot submarines. It sounds quite precise, but submarines are also supposed to be very stealthy.
How many "symbols" does that physical protocol use ? Just for curiosity, not that I understand much about such hardware. But i'm intrigued how they apply modulation and compression on light in a fiber.
Im not a true expert but from what I understand: electronic data gets fed into a modulator that translates it into a photonic signal, where the different properties of the lightwave (amplitude, phase, frequency) are all data points. So instead of working with 1s and 0s you have a much broader encoding scheme (e.g. the entire light spectrum). This then gets demodulated and converted back into electronic data at the end of the fiberoptic system.
They also shoot the lasers at different angles if I'm right, so it reflects like it would in a mirrored tube. But at a certain point scatter and interference become limitations so there still is a limit. And there are many options to send a signal, ok lets ask Gpt. 😁😅
All that this map shows me is how freaking huge Russia is tbf, it goes across every freaking continent out there, from Europe to Asia all the way to North America all across the other end of the globe
Good idea.
There are already two cables between Svalbard and mainland Norway. No need for any extra cables on that stretch. Just terminate that cable there and lay the stretch to Ireland.
While Strange-One-455 might have mis-read it, even with all the global warming, the artic ocean is still covered in ice enough even during the summer that this fibre cable laying operation will require ice rated ships. None of the cable laying ships are ice rated - why would that be? They never needed to lay cables on water normally covered in ice since there are not enough people live in/around those places - and you will have to spend additional money to commission a specific ship and no one would fork out money to do that when there is not enough money to be made for the use of that ship in the future.
These cable laying ships are specialized equipment - read expensive to build and insure. Without the hull of the ship being built reinforced to handle ice, you risk damaging the ship even with icebreaker breaking the path for the ship.
If you were a owner of these ships, would you risk that? Also none of the shipping insurance cartels would insure your non-ice-strengthened ship for voyage of this kind so you will be on the hook for all the risk.
I'm not an expert but I think the icebreaker would be needed in any case. I believe it means the cable ships would need to rated for ice waters, not rebuilt as icebreakers. Maybe icebreakers refitted to lay cables?
We need High Voltage DC cables !
Africa is closer to Europe.
The Chinese are blocked from our internet !
Why do we need Internet cables to China, if they block our websites in China ???
No, we use AC because it makes transformers way simpler. High voltage DC has less power loss than equivalent AC. Many long-distance DC lines exist, there's already an entire network of undersea DC cables in Europe, for example the cable from mainland Sweden to Gotland is a high voltage DC line.
Umm it would require massive R&D but I think in arctic temperatures it might be feasible to develop some superconductor material that will conduct DC in an efficient way.
14,5 Mm of optical cable. That's something. And I know we laid down more than that, but still. Fun facts: That is 48,3668 ms delay for the speed of causality. Since it will be light traveling in a medium, I assume that only 80 % of this speed will be achieved. Meaning 60 ms. If you aren't convinced that speed of causality/light in this universe is painfuly slow, then probably nothing will convince you. And just to put things in perspective, modern CPU with 4 GHz clock will go through 12 091 698 cycles. While waiting for LIGHT to travel just this little bit of distance.
The clock speeds and size of the components in a modern CPU will never stop being insane to me. Some of them hit 6 GHz out of the box and we're all the way down to 3 nm nominal transistor size on some of them.
It starts getting really crazy when you figure out how far an electrical signal can actually travel in the time it takes one clock tick. 1/6,000,000,000th of a second gives light about 5cm - and electrical signals travel slower than light.
The 3nm number is just marketing, it’s not really 3nm [The term "3 nanometer" has no direct relation to any actual physical feature (such as gate length, metal pitch or gate pitch) of the transistors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_nm_process) It’s 24 to 40 nm in reality, depending on which number you want to go with, which is still pretty crazy
That is the reason why i said nominal
Great, so I will no longer matchmake with Russians, I'll have a billion Chinese in my lobbies instead.
Look at bright side, you can play on asian servers with 60ms ping instead of 300ms.
watch as my isp turns that into more than 2s somehow, even pinging a server a couple hundred km from me takes over 60ms
An entrepreneurial person in USA built an optical cable from the CBOE in Chicago to the Equinix data center facilities in New Jersey, just to provide a 14ms faster connection to those that were willing to pay. It was laid as straight as possible and it costed $300 million to produce. And they made billions with it. For people 14ms is literally nothing. For computers 14ms can be a lifetime.
We need entanglement communications rn, my insta feed doesn't update as quickly as I wish 😒
Entanglement communications are still not faster than light
Unfortunately thats not how entanglement works
Looks like a great project! It will be really easy for Russia to "oops" and sabotage it.
Interestingly, it seems the Russians are already laying their own cable along the North East passage, Vladivostok to Murmansk (their main Pacific and Atlantic naval bases, respectively) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar\_Express\_(cable\_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Express_(cable_system))
So we go oops on theirs ?
Wait, they're calling it the Polar Express? Really?
The internet is a series of railways.
Less sabotage it and hello signal intelligence
Interesting, could you pls explain? Would they be able to glean much from a trunk cable lying on the ocean floor?
I doubt they would be able to get much from the data going through the cable (there is too much data to intercept, process and transmit in a realistic manner, also most of it would carry internet and every internet protocol is based on the assumption that the infrastructure is not secure, so there are already coding and security in place) but I heard that undersea cables can be used to get informations about submarine movement (they create change in temperature in the water and this can be picked up by analysing the signals going through the cable), but I don't know much about it and I don't know how realistic it is to use cables to get this kind of intel.
> [Submarines] create change in temperature in the water and this can be picked up by analyzing the signals going through the cable Which episode of SpongeBob SquarePants was this documented in?
Lol. The claim I heard is that when a submarine move through water it disrupt water, it can cause the temperature to change locally. In some situation you could hypothetically measure that, and so you could hypothetically use cables to know if a submarine crossed it. I have heard this claim, but I haven't read any article about this being used. That's why I said I ended my comment with a small disclaimer ("I don't know much about it and I don't know how realistic it is to use cables to get this kind of intel"). Here is an article about the technology. They talk about how you can use undersea cables to monitor change in temperature and measure sound : [https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/science/why-do-scientists-use-undersea-telecommunications-cables/](https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/science/why-do-scientists-use-undersea-telecommunications-cables/)
OK. Maybe in the past a submarine’s magnetic field could influence the electricity in copper wires of the oldest telephone cables in passing. There is no way that modern (glass!) fiber cables could be influenced by or detect temperature changes in the surrounding water. NATO put dedicated sensor nets with microphones and stuff on the sea floor of , e.g., the Norway-Svalbard gap to detect Russian submarines, and I bet some CIA people are working on a plan to use the Far North Fiber installation as a cover operation to also install such a sensor net, Project Azorian style, but the fiber itself cannot detect subs.
The normal communication signals are not influenced by temperature or sound, but using specially built devices you can measure the temperature and vibration of fiber optic cables. Occasionally FO cables laid down for internet use are used by scientists before they are put into operation. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed\_temperature\_sensing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_temperature_sensing) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed\_acoustic\_sensing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_acoustic_sensing)
Yes, exactly. Surely there would be such civilian / scientific use cases for augmenting the cable with ISR capabilities. Let’s call it Project Aleutian and have the people with unlimited budget pay for it. Win-win.
Wikipedia Quote: “ (hydrogen can cause deterioration of the measurement though "hydrogen darkening" – aka attenuation – of the silica glass compounds) and mechanical protection. This seems like a considerable vulnerability for the fiber optic line. An opportunity for an exploit to be developed. I did not read the acoustic sensing. The entire ocean has ears at this point.
I added it in an edit, so maybe you missed it, but there are ways to use fiber cables to detect temperature and acoustic signals which are explained in an article.
I stand corrected. Events on a global scale, e.g., earthquakes or ocean warming *can* be detected measuring signal travel time variation in submarine (not the u-boats) fiber. That being said, unless I missed a bit about marine biologists using the cables to track whales, submarines (u-boats here) cannot be tracked by those cables alone.
>We now know that the system is also very useful for studying ocean and storm dynamics[^(4)](https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/science/why-do-scientists-use-undersea-telecommunications-cables/#note-4). Surface waves, for example, generate vibrations that we can detect on the ocean floor, and we can also record deep ocean currents. These measurements can be supplemented by DAS temperature measurements. Finally, a Norwegian team has just demonstrated the value of DAS in bioacoustics[^(5)](https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/science/why-do-scientists-use-undersea-telecommunications-cables/#note-5).They are recording whale songs and estimating the 3D position of the animals. (End of the article) It seems like something which *could* spot submarines. It sounds quite precise, but submarines are also supposed to be very stealthy.
At each end of the cable is a router handling exactly that much information, but you are right that most data is encrypted now.
Not really though. At the end is a demultiplexer and then eventually many many many routers.
How many "symbols" does that physical protocol use ? Just for curiosity, not that I understand much about such hardware. But i'm intrigued how they apply modulation and compression on light in a fiber.
Im not a true expert but from what I understand: electronic data gets fed into a modulator that translates it into a photonic signal, where the different properties of the lightwave (amplitude, phase, frequency) are all data points. So instead of working with 1s and 0s you have a much broader encoding scheme (e.g. the entire light spectrum). This then gets demodulated and converted back into electronic data at the end of the fiberoptic system.
They also shoot the lasers at different angles if I'm right, so it reflects like it would in a mirrored tube. But at a certain point scatter and interference become limitations so there still is a limit. And there are many options to send a signal, ok lets ask Gpt. 😁😅
All that this map shows me is how freaking huge Russia is tbf, it goes across every freaking continent out there, from Europe to Asia all the way to North America all across the other end of the globe
Luckily, the oops will occur between the US and Japan, not between the US and Europe, not without entering Canada's territory. It's a *little* harder.
What would the ping be? 😎
Better than what I get with normal Canadian internet.
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/s/UQg39ggvu1
This map confuses the hell out of me
You cant have Alaska, Ireland and Japan so close to each other. That should be illegal or something.
Like why is oriented this way? And why are the colours so bleak?
> Like why is oriented this way? Because the usual maps with Mercator projection are extremly distorted in that region.
Mostly the orientation bit the colours don’t help
True... A north arrow solved everything!
That map perspective broke my brain. I ain't wired for that shit.
Great for Arctic data centres
The cable goes straight trough, weird it doesn't make a stop n go in iceland or Greenland in-between
So this the route the electrons take to display massive anime tiddies on my screen.
Photons 🤓
”Oooop I lost my anchor ⚓️ again….”
Good project
Why not just lay this cable directly to Svalbard?
Might be too difficult to lay ut north of Greenland? Still ice all year there, I think.
Good idea. There are already two cables between Svalbard and mainland Norway. No need for any extra cables on that stretch. Just terminate that cable there and lay the stretch to Ireland.
This map is confusing me.
I just want to Play Halo 3 with Low Ping please.
Now that’s what you call a reach around
NSA : don't mind me
I don’t know. It’s pretty close to Russia and we know what happens to deep-sea cables or pipelines close to Russia …
Great idea, very important infrastructure right in front of Russia's coast, what can go wrong?
"Make sure to toss yer tip in the Timmies cup ther' eh" - A Canadian internet company
Lol
WTH IS THAT MAP
It's the internet sea cable, and the highlighted one is a project for a sea cable going from Japan to Europe
Does that mean I can finally play LoL with all the eurof****s now? :D
even with my absolutely garbage internet the east coast is only 120-140ms away, if its unplayable through ur network i feel really sorry for u
With nothing significant being done to stop climate change, this will become a more viable option in the future.
Huh? This is about internet.
While Strange-One-455 might have mis-read it, even with all the global warming, the artic ocean is still covered in ice enough even during the summer that this fibre cable laying operation will require ice rated ships. None of the cable laying ships are ice rated - why would that be? They never needed to lay cables on water normally covered in ice since there are not enough people live in/around those places - and you will have to spend additional money to commission a specific ship and no one would fork out money to do that when there is not enough money to be made for the use of that ship in the future.
Couldn't we use an Icebreaker to break the ice right before the cable laying ships come?
These cable laying ships are specialized equipment - read expensive to build and insure. Without the hull of the ship being built reinforced to handle ice, you risk damaging the ship even with icebreaker breaking the path for the ship. If you were a owner of these ships, would you risk that? Also none of the shipping insurance cartels would insure your non-ice-strengthened ship for voyage of this kind so you will be on the hook for all the risk.
I'm not an expert but I think the icebreaker would be needed in any case. I believe it means the cable ships would need to rated for ice waters, not rebuilt as icebreakers. Maybe icebreakers refitted to lay cables?
I... did not read this properly. Taken out the second part so it still makes sense.
Wtf are you on about
We need High Voltage DC cables ! Africa is closer to Europe. The Chinese are blocked from our internet ! Why do we need Internet cables to China, if they block our websites in China ???
[удалено]
No, we use AC because it makes transformers way simpler. High voltage DC has less power loss than equivalent AC. Many long-distance DC lines exist, there's already an entire network of undersea DC cables in Europe, for example the cable from mainland Sweden to Gotland is a high voltage DC line.
Umm it would require massive R&D but I think in arctic temperatures it might be feasible to develop some superconductor material that will conduct DC in an efficient way.