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Chinese Ship Suspected of Dragging Anchor 100 Miles to Cut Baltic Cables
- hu3 2y agoI wonder if we will be able to completely replace these cables with satellites one day.
- jazzyjackson 2y agoRedundancy doesn't hurt.
- shiroiushi 2y agoYou have to develop subspace (i.e. faster-than-light) communications for this to work. The distance between two points in Europe, after bouncing off a satellite in geostationary orbit, is very, very far, and EM waves can only travel at lightspeed, resulting in very long latency. It's significantly faster if your satellite is in low-earth orbit, but you can't keep a satellite in a fixed position there, so now you need a whole swarm of them so you have sufficient coverage at any time, and you need a way of periodically boosting their orbits or replacing them as they fall into the atmosphere. There's a very good reason the world likes submarine cables for internet communications.
- thegrim33 2y agoIsn't that exactly what Starlink and other similar services are doing? They're putting swarms of communication satellites into LEO for this very purpose. Starlinks are placed in LEO at 550km, which would have a theoretical 3.6ms round-trip ping at the speed of light. That is not a "very long latency".
- shiroiushi 2y agoNo, it's not, it's doing the "swarm" thing I mentioned to get around the limitations of GEO. The downside is now you have a big swarm of satellites in orbit, interfering with telescopes, and regularly falling into the atmosphere. Also, there's a significant cost to maintaining this system, and its total bandwidth capability is limited.
- verzali 2y agoNo, we won't. It would be easier and cheaper to replace them with microwave links or something like that. Satellites are always more expensive, limited in power, harder to fix, and unlikely to ever match the capacity of underwater cables.
- N19PEDL2 2y agoI think microwaves could be jammed too. The safest solution is probably to run the cables over the Øresund Bridge and the future Fehmarn Belt tunnel, and then continue overland to Finland.
- mjbeswick 2y agoNo because they would be point to point. Many parts of the phone network were connected via microwave links before fibre optic cables replaced them, as fibre carry much higher amounts of data.
- rcxdude 2y agoNo, even with Starlink lowering the latency to an acceptable level, there's no way to get anywhere near the total bandwidth of these cables with a satellite constellation, there's limits to how much you can transmit through the air (the biggest issue being there's limits to how tightly you can form beams from your satellite to a station on the ground, and those are quite large, so you ultimately can only get a certain bandwidth per square kilometer). (This, BTW, is why Starlink isn't and will never be a true competitor to traditional ISPs in all but the most sparsely populated areas: they simply cannot support enough users to make a dent in most places)
- pcl 2y agoOriginal lengthy title: "Chinese Ship’s Crew Suspected of Deliberately Dragging Anchor for 100 Miles to Cut Baltic Cables" https://archive.is/sa1VE https://archive.is/sa1VE
- gnabgib 2y agoRelated Sweden seeks clarity from China about suspected sabotage of undersea cables (3 points, 55 minutes ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42268586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42268586 E.U. Vessels Surround Anchored Chinese Ship After Baltic Sea Cables Are Severed (5 points, 16 hours ago, 2 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42262913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42262913 This story previously with limited discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42256553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42256553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42263100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42263100
- perihelions 2y agoAlso, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42191394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42191394 ("Yi Peng 3 crossed both cables C-Lion 1 and BSC at times matching when they broke (bsky.app)", 756 comments)
- EA-3167 2y agoI'll add, Dr. Sal Mercagliano has an excellent YouTube channel that covers shipping (a topic he's a qualified expert in) and he has a video discussing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJmqCKtJnxM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJmqCKtJnxM The bottom line is that the alleged incident occurred in deep water, making an accidental, unnoticed anchor runnout *very* unlikely. He describes it as "A coincidence, and a very strange one," that this one vessel was seemingly over both cables just at the time they were severed, and gives a visual of maritime tracking to illustrate this.
- ungreased0675 2y agoThere’s a devious ambiguity in this type of conflict. Is it an act of war? Sabotage? Accident? Negligence?
- metalman 2y agothat this is a blithe, broad daylight incident, with no attempt at concealment or escape, means that it is a very specific.....response.....to something else....that we are not privy to some sort of spiders in a jar,geopolitical poker game turned grudge match
- facialwipe 2y agoThe result of the cable cut was essentially meaningless. I doubt there was intent to cut these specific cables. https://labs.ripe.net/author/emileaben/does-the-internet-route-around-damage-baltic-sea-cable-cuts/ https://labs.ripe.net/author/emileaben/does-the-internet-rou...
- jkuli 2y agoAnother attempt to protect children from the internet? How thoughtful.