This is slightly tangential, but it's Atlantic-cable-related, and I just learned about it. Let me set the stage. By the 1920s, analog fax technology was established and there were a variety of experimental and early commercial systems in use. One of the first uses of modems was to transmit faxes over the long-distance telephone network, turning a voltage into a pitch, and vice versa. The electronic marvel of the 1930s in the newsroom, aside from the teletypes, was that you could take a photo in San Francisco and have it published just hours later in New York.
But how do you get a picture across the Atlantic Ocean? Those analog fax systems suffer from noise and in the experimental systems of the 1910s and 1920s long-distance was impractical. Shortwave to get over the Ocean was right out. There were no transoceanic telephone links. But there were submarine telegraph cables. Morse code or Baudot telex. Not very fast with no amplifiers along the lines yet. But you could send a telex across the Atlantic ocean.
Enter the Bartlane transmission system. First, five photographs were developed from the original negative, at different exposure levels, using a conductive developer. So each point of the image is more or less conductive depending on its exposure. Each of these photos is scanned, as if it had pixels, and a 1-bit intensity value collected for for all five photographs, creating a five-level greyscale bitmap image on tape basically. (Five bits worked with existing Baudot code equipment.)
This enormous tape was then sent over the wire. On the receiving end a printer, with intensity controlled by the level indicated, would then selectively expose a spot on a photographic plate to light, as it stepped through the tape. Six hours to send a small image. But digital was the only way to send a photograph from London to New York overnight from its early trials in the 1920s until the 1950s.
Imagine the price of exclusive use of a transatlantic telex line for that length of time! Teleprinters back then commonly ran at 50 baud, so a 400x300 dot photo would take a little more than 40 minutes (120000 dots / 50 baud / 60 seconds)
The linked article mentions that the punched tape could be cut into several pieces then transmitted in parallel over several telex lines at once. At the receiving end the punched tapes would be spliced back together in correct order, and then used to create the photographic negative.
That's an interesting piece of historic technology. Thanks.
Cool. We take it for granted, but the intercontinental data (and voice) connectivity cables are an impressive achievement for humanity -- technical, and for global community. And globe.gl has me "seeing" for the first time a particular cable for which I have a much smaller personal story.
One of those submarine cables being severed accounts for one of only two software/hardware downtimes for a B2B startup's launch MVP, which had been deployed in critical production overseas.
Our station appliances at the facility needed to talk with servers (at the network-closest AWS AZ) multiple times a minute, for cryptographic security reasons. The appliances had a boot-time check for network connectivity (which saw extreme latency and packet loss as network unavailable). For reasons, the facility powered off all equipment at night.
One day, the facility said the appliances wouldn't "turn on", I quickly found they were having network problems, but facility insisted their LAN and Internet connectivity was fine. I was able to carefully SSH in (with terminal responsiveness like a bad dialup to an overloaded timesharing system), and relaxed the timeout on the check that was in a retry loop, and the stations came to life (albeit network requests during operations much slower than normal). The facility manager advised later that day that it turns out a submarine cable had been severed.
Indeed, especially for those few spots seemingly in the middle of the ocean where the cables converge it would be interesting to know what land masses (if any) are nearby. Right now this is very difficult to see.
This might be a stupid question, but is it implicit that these "submarine cables" are all fiber cables? If so, are they of similar or very different bandwidths? I would think there are cables of differing ages that are used for different things, or are all non-fiber cables taken out of service long ago, or are they just not included on the map?
Also, the "Polar Express" cable on that map is fascinating, but it seems like it's not planned to be completed until 2026.[1]
Copper communications cable were in use from 1850 until the 1980s, when they were replaced one by one with fiber.
Almost all the copper cables ever laid are still in the depths of the ocean, as it's not worth salvaging them except near shore. A few of the more recent copper cables are still operational, but they are used only for scientific research.
I strongly doubt there are any non-fiber submarine cables. Fiber's main strength is range; trying to run signals over electrical conductors over hundred-km-plus distances is not cost-effective and hasn't been for decades.
(It's been done historically, but with very heavy cables, very high endpoint power levels, lots of repeaters, and really poor throughput.)
When I lived in the Cayman Islands, the primary submarine cable (I forget its name) was fiber, and I had better net there than I had in the US. It went down for a week or two one time, and the entire island's net traffic was relegated to a much older copper cable that ran to Jamaica. Cayman is a tiny market, but it still crippled our net because the bandwidth was tiny; it was like a couple T1s for the whole population.
Yes operating a non fibre cable is too expensive and does not make sense. Fibre cables on the other hand have remained operational over a long time. AFAIK there are no fibre cables using electro optic repeaters operational anymore. But the earliest fibres which used optical amplification are still operational. This is the beauty about fibre communication. You largely only need to upgrade the endpoints to increase your throughput.
You can find the FLAG cable referenced in the article on this map. The easiest landmark for finding it is the narrow section of the Malay peninsula. Stephenson spends some time in the article covering the overland construction there.
It’s amazing to see that we are essentially just having one huge LAN party. I wonder if the inventors of the phone or internet could have ever imagined this. Now with low orbit satellites connecting the world too, the innovation is incredible on this planet.
I'm a bit curious about something that I've never thought about before -- how were telegraph signals routed? Was it just a one way street, or did they have a frequency range to work with?
Little need, it's essentially all government run bases down there and they get their internet through various satellite links. You could maybe run one to McMurdo Station since it's on solid land and by a bay but there's just not enough data to justify the cost.
I wonder if UK can use the fact that most US - EU links go through UK as a leverage.
EDIT: answer is yes:
"LONDON (Reuters) - High-speed sub-Atlantic cables may force banks to keep their armoury of currency trading hardware in London for some time, even if the dealers themselves go elsewhere when Britain leaves the European Union." [1]
A good idea in theory, but I believe phase 2 of our flawless and perfectly thought out Brexit execution plan is to sever all of those cables to prevent unwanted "foreign" bits from coming in and taking up British bandwidth.
We're then going to individually renegotiate brand new communication transport/protocols with each foreign nation separately. On far better terms, over the next 20-25 years.
I think the current plan is to use a different breed of carrier pigeon for each country so that we can tell where the data is coming from and where to send our responses back to.
Actually bit weird how there is not a single cable going from Ireland to France (or elsewhere in the continent). I guess going through UK works, but there are so many cables all around the place that you'd think one of them would cross that gap.
These sorts of projects are always fascinating to me. The hard part of these sorts of visualizations always seems to be acquiring the data in the first place. I would have no idea where to begin looking for a record of exactly how all of the underwater fiber optic cables are positioned. I wonder whether people come across this sort of data and think to do something with it, or whether people start by deciding to make this visualization and then go forth and search out the data.
It's interesting that there are so many cables running through the Suez Canal. I wonder if it's because of geopolitical reasons for avoiding going over land through the Middle East.
There’s some interesting military history and tech regarding submarine cables. The first act of WW1 was to sever a cable, for example. And during the Cold War the Americans planted bugs on Russian cables and were eventually exposed by a spy. Nowadays the Russians have some interesting capabilities that can be inferred.
Some years ago I was contacted by the descendants of an English engineer who was working at the Long Island NY cable station of the German Atlantic cable via the Azores at the start of WWI.
Back in the 1950s a family member had recorded him on open reel tape reminiscing about his experiences, and this was later converted to audio cassettes. They sent me the tapes, and I cleaned up the audio for them, and they gave me permission to post the transcription and audio on my site.
Turned out he was actually watching the signals coming in from a German operator when the cable was cut by the Brits, and he talks about this on one of the tapes.
- Cocos Islands has their own cable and they don't even have 600 people;
- Saint Helena has its own cable (googled to find out it is very recent and will start offering 18Gbps in 2022);
- French Polynesia seems well served.
Tristan da Cunha and Pitcairn probably will never get their cables.
I suspect that some of those places host strategically important communications facilities. Perhaps spy satellite downlink facilities, perhaps GNSS ground-segment base stations, perhaps earth stations for other communications satellites.
Oddly, those two specific islands don't. Saint Helena is specifically courting such business, but I don't see any indication that they've attracted anyway. But several other small islands are definitely fibered-up on account of their satellite facilities.
There’s not a lot of content to be exchanged between Siberia and Alaska. And running long stretches of fiber over land is actually more costly and subject to failure than under the sea, so going from Moscow -> Vladivostok (or something) over land, then going subsea, and then Alaska -> West-coast US over land, is not really beneficial.
[+] [-] retrac|4 years ago|reply
But how do you get a picture across the Atlantic Ocean? Those analog fax systems suffer from noise and in the experimental systems of the 1910s and 1920s long-distance was impractical. Shortwave to get over the Ocean was right out. There were no transoceanic telephone links. But there were submarine telegraph cables. Morse code or Baudot telex. Not very fast with no amplifiers along the lines yet. But you could send a telex across the Atlantic ocean.
Enter the Bartlane transmission system. First, five photographs were developed from the original negative, at different exposure levels, using a conductive developer. So each point of the image is more or less conductive depending on its exposure. Each of these photos is scanned, as if it had pixels, and a 1-bit intensity value collected for for all five photographs, creating a five-level greyscale bitmap image on tape basically. (Five bits worked with existing Baudot code equipment.)
This enormous tape was then sent over the wire. On the receiving end a printer, with intensity controlled by the level indicated, would then selectively expose a spot on a photographic plate to light, as it stepped through the tape. Six hours to send a small image. But digital was the only way to send a photograph from London to New York overnight from its early trials in the 1920s until the 1950s.
http://www.hffax.de/history/html/bartlane.html
[+] [-] chiph|4 years ago|reply
Imagine the price of exclusive use of a transatlantic telex line for that length of time! Teleprinters back then commonly ran at 50 baud, so a 400x300 dot photo would take a little more than 40 minutes (120000 dots / 50 baud / 60 seconds)
The linked article mentions that the punched tape could be cut into several pieces then transmitted in parallel over several telex lines at once. At the receiving end the punched tapes would be spliced back together in correct order, and then used to create the photographic negative.
That's an interesting piece of historic technology. Thanks.
[+] [-] andrepd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] axiosgunnar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neilv|4 years ago|reply
One of those submarine cables being severed accounts for one of only two software/hardware downtimes for a B2B startup's launch MVP, which had been deployed in critical production overseas.
Our station appliances at the facility needed to talk with servers (at the network-closest AWS AZ) multiple times a minute, for cryptographic security reasons. The appliances had a boot-time check for network connectivity (which saw extreme latency and packet loss as network unavailable). For reasons, the facility powered off all equipment at night.
One day, the facility said the appliances wouldn't "turn on", I quickly found they were having network problems, but facility insisted their LAN and Internet connectivity was fine. I was able to carefully SSH in (with terminal responsiveness like a bad dialup to an overloaded timesharing system), and relaxed the timeout on the check that was in a retry loop, and the stations came to life (albeit network requests during operations much slower than normal). The facility manager advised later that day that it turns out a submarine cable had been severed.
[+] [-] tantalor|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] contravariant|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnarn|4 years ago|reply
Also, the "Polar Express" cable on that map is fascinating, but it seems like it's not planned to be completed until 2026.[1]
[1]: https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/asia-europe-afr...
[+] [-] cableguy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azernik|4 years ago|reply
(It's been done historically, but with very heavy cables, very high endpoint power levels, lots of repeaters, and really poor throughput.)
[+] [-] caymanjim|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cycomanic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] genghisjahn|4 years ago|reply
Mother Earth Mother Board
>The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth.
https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
[+] [-] wrycoder|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanTheManPR|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gus_massa|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johncena33|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshspankit|4 years ago|reply
Anyone have one that shows the land cables connecting the undersea ones? I’d like to see how (and which) traffic gets to my particular inland city.
[+] [-] savingGrace|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] todd3834|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kube-system|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] globular-toast|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cableguy|4 years ago|reply
1850 - first telegraph cable laid across the English Channel between England and France.
1858 - first Atlantic telegraph cable between Ireland and Newfoundland.
1866 - first permanently successful Atlantic telegraph cable.
1891 - first telephone cable laid across the English Channel.
1902 - two telegraph cables laid across the Pacific Ocean.
1956 - first telephone cable across the Atlantic.
1988 - first fiber optic cable across the Atlantic.
My cable history website has records of over 2,200 telegraph, telephone and fiber optic cables laid worldwide between 1850 and 2021: https://atlantic-cable.com/Cables/CableTimeLine/index.htm
The front page of the site links to over a thousand individual pages on cable history: https://atlantic-cable.com
[+] [-] jrsdav|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
Submarine Cable Map 2021 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27410133 - June 2021 (83 comments) (<-- fabulous top comment)
Submarine Cable Map - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25020431 - Nov 2020 (134 comments)
Greg's Cable Map - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15176011 - Sept 2017 (41 comments)
Submarine cable map - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13614598 - Feb 2017 (35 comments)
Map of Undersea Internet Cables - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10163461 - Sept 2015 (13 comments)
Submarine Cable Map - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9216894 - March 2015 (39 comments)
Submarine Cable Map 2014 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8242448 - Aug 2014 (110 comments) (<-- also a great top comment)
Submarine Cable Map 2013 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5151469 - Feb 2013 (10 comments)
2012 Submarine Cable Map - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4218909 - July 2012 (68 comments)
Submarine Cable Map - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3643749 - Feb 2012 (109 comments)
Interactive Submarine Cable Map - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3481944 - Jan 2012 (1 comment)
Map of worldwide undersea cables - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1606366 - Aug 2010 (49 comments)
Map of All Undersea Internet Cables - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=423730 - Jan 2009 (2 comments)
[+] [-] gorjusborg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtkwe|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundsen%E2%80%93Scott_South_P...
[+] [-] Karawebnetwork|4 years ago|reply
https://www.convergencialatina.com/News-Detail/324197-3-8-Da...
[+] [-] MivLives|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhealy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwbigdata|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luxuryballs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antattack|4 years ago|reply
EDIT: answer is yes: "LONDON (Reuters) - High-speed sub-Atlantic cables may force banks to keep their armoury of currency trading hardware in London for some time, even if the dealers themselves go elsewhere when Britain leaves the European Union." [1]
[1]https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-global-forex-cables/trans...
[+] [-] tailspin2019|4 years ago|reply
We're then going to individually renegotiate brand new communication transport/protocols with each foreign nation separately. On far better terms, over the next 20-25 years.
I think the current plan is to use a different breed of carrier pigeon for each country so that we can tell where the data is coming from and where to send our responses back to.
[+] [-] zokier|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] not2b|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] CobrastanJorji|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msmith|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkonline|4 years ago|reply
[1]: https://he.net/3d-map/
[2]: of course, today the desktop I'm using doesn't support WebGL and I can't see the submarine filter on my phone. YMMV
[+] [-] willvarfar|4 years ago|reply
http://www.hisutton.com/Undersea_Cables.html
[+] [-] cableguy|4 years ago|reply
Back in the 1950s a family member had recorded him on open reel tape reminiscing about his experiences, and this was later converted to audio cassettes. They sent me the tapes, and I cleaned up the audio for them, and they gave me permission to post the transcription and audio on my site.
Turned out he was actually watching the signals coming in from a German operator when the cable was cut by the Brits, and he talks about this on one of the tapes.
The story and short audio file are on my site: https://atlantic-cable.com/CableStories/Claypoole/index.htm
[+] [-] forinti|4 years ago|reply
- Cocos Islands has their own cable and they don't even have 600 people; - Saint Helena has its own cable (googled to find out it is very recent and will start offering 18Gbps in 2022); - French Polynesia seems well served.
Tristan da Cunha and Pitcairn probably will never get their cables.
[+] [-] myself248|4 years ago|reply
Oddly, those two specific islands don't. Saint Helena is specifically courting such business, but I don't see any indication that they've attracted anyway. But several other small islands are definitely fibered-up on account of their satellite facilities.
[+] [-] WarOnPrivacy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown_apostle|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m-app|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theandrewbailey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Daviey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doerig|4 years ago|reply