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Subsea Cable to Connect Asia, Europe, and North America Through the Arctic
- pchristensen 5y agoIf this Is at all interesting to you, you’ll love Neal Stephenson‘a classic Wired piece Mother Earth, Motherboard - https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
- asimpletune 5y agoI wonder if melting ice is making this easier to do or more economically feasible than it has been in the past?
- grecy 5y agoYes, Absolutely. A handful of years ago sailing through the North West Passage (around Alaska then across above Canada) was unheard of. Now it's quite routine, lots of people do it for fun every summer.
- tupac_speedrap 5y agoProbably, Russia are also building the "Polar Express" subsea cable from Murmansk to Vladivostok around Siberia so I guess is it viable now.
- tiernano 5y agoI vaguely remember reading that there were shipping routes that would be half the time and distance if the ice was melted... And some ships run during the summer months... Mostly from Russia to Europe... Iirc...
- dragonelite 5y agoThe route will become more popular, it's not a route the US can in anyway block. If i'm not mistaken Russia can now ship 8~10 months of the year via the artic route, they want/are planning to create more nuclear ice breakers i'm sure the Chinese are more then willing to make sure the Artic route stays open the whole year.
- zerovar 5y agoWendover Productions had a video on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msjuRoZ0Vu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msjuRoZ0Vu8
- tiernano 5y agothats probably where i heard about it.
- asimpletune 5y agoAlso - totally unrealistic - but what if the ice freezed again, making the cables impermeable to spying and ushering in some kind of golden era of diplomacy and trust. I remember reading that in times when technology favored defense there were widespread moments of peace throughout Europe, like in the Middle Ages, so this could be something like that.
- throw0101a 5y ago> but what if the ice freezed again, making the cables impermeable to spying and ushering in some kind of golden era of diplomacy and trust. It would make no difference: subsea cables are accessed via submarine, which don't care about ice (or no ice). * https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/the-creepy-long-standing-practice-of-undersea-cable-tapping/277855/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/th... * https://www.lawfareblog.com/evaluating-russian-threat-undersea-cables https://www.lawfareblog.com/evaluating-russian-threat-unders... * https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/we-now-have-details-uss-jimmy-carter-spy-submarines-secret-mission-129272 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/we-now-have-details-u... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter
- nradov 5y agoSpying by tapping into unencrypted traffic on undersea cables was done briefly during the Cold War. Now governments encrypt all their traffic so you won't get anything useful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells?wprov=sfla...
- wyck 5y agoThere still a lot of tapping going on, there are modern subs build specifically for this.
- jvmiert 5y agoFor anyone curious, there's an image of the route in this article: https://www.aroged.com/2021/12/24/far-north-digital-and-cinia-to-build-internet-cable-between-norway-canada-and-japan-under-the-arctic-ocean/ https://www.aroged.com/2021/12/24/far-north-digital-and-cini...
- dustintrex 5y agoInteresting. I naively expected it to take the shortest/great circle route from Europe straight across northern Russia to Japan, but no, it actually loops the other way around the pole via Iceland and Canada.
- fennecfoxen 5y agoLooks like there would be fewer opportunities to stop and connect to existing networks if you went that way.
- Sami_Lehtinen 5y agoOriginal route plan was exactly that, but there are reason why that route wasn't taken. This plan has been open for a decade aka ROTACS. But Russia started to build their own cable Polar Express - https://www.arctictoday.com/work-on-a-russian-trans-arctic-fiber-optic-cable-starts-this-spring/ https://www.arctictoday.com/work-on-a-russian-trans-arctic-f...
- edoceo 5y agoThat article has the same ad like a dozen times in a row, and also what is clearly JavaScript leaking out around them. Cool visual but what a sloppy site.
- mike_d 5y agoI suspect this site is taking a news feed from VK and blending it with content from other sites and rewording things to produce search engine spam. This particular article it looks like ate some JavaScript for breakfast and threw it up all over.
- nnx 5y agoBy how much will it improve latency between EU and Asia? or US and Asia?
- zinekeller 5y agoUS to Asia will be literally a backup routing, since that the best routes between Japan and western US coast are already continuously constructed and maintained. EU and Japan would be godsend, the best direct link would be through China, which is politically and practically (even with the best of diplomatic relations, terrestrial cable linking is much more complicated due to mountains, rivers and other obstacles) impossible. Although there's an EU-Hong Kong terrestrial link operated by RETN, it's a relatively low-bandwidth link compared to the aggregate of all Japan-Singapore-Marseille links, so if this a high-bandwidth link it'll be a boon.
- bertil 5y agoIt could make Northern parts of America, EU and Asia closer but not the Southern parts.
- fulafel 5y agoIt's landing in Alaska, I wonder what the existing submarine cables from there to east land.
- xiii1408 5y agoUnfortunately probably none, unless you live pretty far north. We're pretty close to the speed of light limit* when it comes to latency between the US and Asia, which makes sense as a straight line is over the Pacific anyway. (e.g., I get ~1.1x the theoretical min latency pinging Tokyo from my Fiber connection in the SF Bay Area) Where it seems like we're pretty far from the theoretical min is connections within the continental US. Latency is pretty bad (e.g. I get like 1.5x - 4x the theoretical min latency from my Fiber connection in the SF Bay Area, depending on endpoint). I assume part of this is indirect connections (you don't have a direct fiber connection between every pair of cities, because that would be dumb) and some of it is routing overhead (a connection to Asia goes a long distance, but often has way fewer hops). Note that this is theoretical min latency based on the speed of light through fiber*, which is a bit higher than (about 5/3x) the speed of light through air. New fiber optic tech might help this at some point.
- throw0101a 5y agoSee also the Quintillion cable: > Phase 2: Extends from Washington State to Japan. Connects Alaska to Washington State. > Phase 3: Connects Alaska to Canada. Extends through the Canadian Arctic to London, with landing stations at Thule AFB and Iceland. * https://www.quintillionglobal.com/system/out-asia-europe/ https://www.quintillionglobal.com/system/out-asia-europe/
- drathier 5y agoWhy don't any of these websites have maps?
- hit8run 5y agoI wonder how many parties will be going to tap that wire.
- webdoodle 5y agoTapping undersea cables is one of the most critical missions modern day submarines conduct. So in short: every country that can get a sub that far north.
- ec109685 5y agoWhat entities of strategic importance are still sending unencrypted data over third party fiber?
- tinus_hn 5y agoNormal people do so all the time and their communications are of strategic importance as well.
- hnarn 5y agoWhat kind of “normal people communication” specifically are we referring to that isn’t encrypted on the wire?
- webdoodle 5y agoMetadata, which isn't encrypted, and is still the most powerful part of Prism/Xkeyscore, because most people don't try to understand it.
- thirdlamp 5y agoHow does that compete with starlink? I suppose the bandwidth of a subsea cable is much higher, but latency is worse?
- PeterisP 5y agoThere's no reason for a subsea cable latency to be worse than starlink, both don't go in the straightest line possible but close to that.
- mhandley 5y agoStarlink gets the speed of light in a vaccuum, which is roughly 50% faster than the speed of light in glass.
- jsjohnst 5y agoFiber gets closer to the speed of light, even when accounting for retransmission delays, than just 50%. The index of refraction for glass is commonly quoted as 1.5. That makes it 33%. Also, Starlink isn’t vacuum speeds either (unless you are talking about the inter satellite laser links and not the downlink to CPE, which even they I’m not sure operate at full “speed of light in a vacuum”).
- zamadatix 5y agoThe refractive index is only one part of the story, light does not follow a straight path through fiber it bounces around. I'd assume this to be about the newer inter-sattelite links as comparing fiber to fiber plus some seems obvious.
- wallacoloo 5y ago> light does not follow a straight path through fiber it bounces around. this is only relevant for multimode fiber, right? in singlemode fiber the light must propagate parallel with the fiber. even in multimode fiber, some light is parallel, so it doesn’t necessarily limit latency — it creates dispersion.
- throwbigdata 5y agoOne decision a lot of people did a few years ago was every network link outside of the data center must be encrypted. Not sure I’d be comfortable putting something on Chinese fiber anyway, but I believe that for them to unencrypt they would need tailored operations or significantly better decryption technology that I am familiar with.
- jsmith99 5y agoCinia is not based in China. It seems to be owned by the Finnish government.
- Overtonwindow 5y agoI’ve never quite been able to understand from a technical perspective, but from a Geo political perspective, is why we can’t cut China off from western Internet? A better diplomatic sanction would be to block all Chinese internet traffic.
- FridayoLeary 5y agoFirst of all, nobody will ever introduce any meaningful sanctions against China ever. There are a whole variety of practical and political reasons why not. Also, from what i understand, China is already extremely busy cutting their citizens off from the rest of the internet. (i know this isn't exactly what you meant, but still...)
- anaganisk 5y agoBecause if you cut Chine off the internet, you wont even have electronics anymore. And within months IT in the west will collapse.
- ksec 5y agoIs this Cable specifically for connection to go from EUR to JAP without going through China? I am wondering if this is made possible only because of the melting ice cap, where the "possibility" of travelling through the arctic is now a low cost issue. I am also assuming once the cable are laid, it doesn't make much of a difference whether the surface is Artic or Pacific? I am assuming the sea floor is roughly all the same. And why aren't Greenland better connected? The only immediate upside I see is the Iceland Connection. Considering they have possibly the Greenest Datacenter on the planet. ( I do wonder how do they protect against Earthquake ? )
- 3np 5y ago> Is this Cable specifically for connection to go from EUR to JAP without going through China? ...Is there really any meaningful amount of EU>JP traffic going through China? No matter what I try to increase by bandwidth between the two (from residential as well as cloud) it always gets routed through US. Usually Phoenix. Never been able to get north of ~15Mbps IIRC. I’m sure there are providers that can provide better through private backbone and premium peering agreements, but I haven’t figured that out yet. If anyone has any tips or strategies on how to approach it would be very grateful. Even 50Mbps on a budget would be a game-changer. My guess would be more about resilience. If a couple of key points get knocked out or saturated I imagine things could break pretty fast.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fragmede 5y agoNot all cloud providers are equal so do your own testing on who's got the fastest internal network between Singapore and the EU that doesn't go via the US.
- Kye 5y ago>> "I am also assuming once the cable are laid, it doesn't make much of a difference whether the surface is Artic or Pacific? I am assuming the sea floor is roughly all the same." The ocean is incredibly difficult to explore under the best circumstances. We barely know what's down there in places with lots of traffic and a need for regular, slow, imprecise mapping. More than nothing is known about the floor there, but it's likely less precise and more out of date than places that were easier to reach. The Arctic Ocean wasn't even discovered--in the Age of Exploration sense, not in the "nobody knew about it" sense--until the 1800s. Exploration didn't properly begin until the 1950s. https://www.britannica.com/place/Arctic-Ocean/Topography-of-the-ocean-floor https://www.britannica.com/place/Arctic-Ocean/Topography-of-...
- virtuallynathan 5y agoArctic routes have been proposed for a long time, I hope this finally happens. 2014: https://spectrum.ieee.org/arctic-fibre-project-to-link-japan-and-uk https://spectrum.ieee.org/arctic-fibre-project-to-link-japan...
- sancho_panza 5y agoWhat’s to stop a terrorist from severing one of these cables and severely debilitating the global network? I’m sure redundancy would stop such issues but still.
- freeone3000 5y agoSame thing that stops them now -- not a lot, but it wouldn't do a tremendous amount. it's not unheard of for undersea cables to be cut by accident by fishing trawlers and the like.