Equiano, a subsea cable from Portugal to South Africa | Hacker News Reader

Equiano, a subsea cable from Portugal to South Africa

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134 pointssauldcosta69 comments

Submarine cables are a mystery to a lot of people. I had to show my dad a complete map of the cables once to convince him they exist. He just couldn’t fathom we’re actually able to run thousands of km of cables at the bottom of the ocean.

Well I still have trouble with that, and a map wouldn't help very much. Imagine convincing governments to make the huge en-devour of placing thousands of kilometers of cables under the sea, and maintaining them, just for some "nerd stuff". If they did, they probably had a very good reason convincing them.

Except that is generally not governments doing it; it is private companies. It is pure profit motive. Despite the great cost, the cables are profitable.

What happens if the cable stops working? What are the troubleshooting steps?

Figure out roughly where the problem is (a number of ways of doing this), then send a boat out with a hook to grab the cable off the bottom of the ocean. Pull it up to the surface, fix it, and lower it back down.

Incredibly expensive operation, so you want to avoid this if at all possible...

What measures are taken to avoid this? I read somewhere that these cable are not actually buried into the ground, but rather lay on top of the ground. That sounds very risky to me?

They are buried only when close to shores or in other high risk areas. There is no point in burying a cable if the sea bed is 3 miles under the surface. There is still danger, from animals biting into the cable (sharks are known to do this). But the cables are wrapped in steel cables so not even a shark should be able to cut through.

> There is no point in burying a cable if the sea bed is 3 miles under the surface.

There is a point, it's just not something we're able to do. You can get the cable onto the sea bed by lowering it from the surface. We know how to get to the surface.

To bury it, you'd need to run a digging operation at the bottom of the ocean.

...which we're able to do, we do somewhat similar digs for offshore oil all the time, but it's not worth the gargantuan expense. The risk of leaving it exposed is worth it.

When we're saying incredibly expensive, what are we talking here? $10M repair job?

I googled and found this https://ore.catapult.org.uk/app/uploads/2018/02/Export-Cable...

Costs between £5.3m and £15.5m

Wikipedia has a nice gif of the repair process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable...

Funny random thing from that. In 1959 the Americans got annoyed by a Russian trawler breaking their cable and complained they'd broken the Convention for the Protection of Submarine Telegraph Cables of 1884. Who'da thought this was going on in 1884?

> Who'da thought this was going on in 1884?

It's well-known in Britain, at least. It looks to be part of the science examination taken at age 16 [2].

On your Wikipedia page, the section "British dominance of early cable" [1] describes the early success in this technology.

Last time I was at the Science Museum in London, they had an exhibition on transatlantic cables. I think it's part of the permanent exhibition. [0] [3]

[0] https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/how-per...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/teach/class-clips-video/the-invention-of... (video probably only available in the UK).

[3] https://collection.sciencemuseum.org.uk/search/gallery/infor...

You would probably be interested in looking into the USS Jimmy Carter submarine....

The one the NSA uses to pull up and splice spying equipment into undersea cables....

They don't do that with most of the cables, the cable just comes ashore and goes into the NSA/GCHQ box and that is it.

So I guess that Google have done a deal with the devil already with this, wherever that cable comes ashore will be the mystery room with mystery kit inside, much like what goes on in Sennen in Cornwall. Cable and Wireless operate the cable, it goes to the GCHQ box that then connects with GCHQ in Bude and then on to the doughnut in Cheltenham where the spying for the NSA is done. This is the 'special relationship'.

Nobody thinks Google is evil(!) so you have to wonder how much is done as per the 'Glomar Explorer', with the whole thing being a bit of a cover story. The race is on for Africa with the option being Google doing it or the dreaded Huawei doing it, which would really mean getting the USS Jimmy Carter out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer

“Britain's very first action after declaring war on Germany in World War I was to have the cable ship Alert (not the CS Telconia as frequently reported)[12] cut the five cables linking Germany with France, Spain and the Azores, and through them, North America.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cab...

I’d like to read more about the theory behind that decision. There are so many interesting possibilities if the cables were left in place.

Also, how did the Zimmerman telegraph happen if Germany to Mexico was cut off?

The telegram was sent to the German embassy in the United States for re-transmission to Eckardt in Mexico.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram

I believe they had enough wireless stations to get across the Atlantic or they could communicate via diplomatic bag through neutral countries/ones with intact cables

The first transatlantic cable was laid in 1858. I guess the major continents all had been connected before the end of 1800s.

I heartily recommend Andrew Blum's book Tubes: Behind the Scenes at the Internet for any non-technical folks interested in the physical infrastructure that makes all that internet magic happen. It's more in the travel memoir/popular history genres than actual engineering, but a very atmospheric layman's introduction.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23047146-tubes

And of course, if you're ever in SW England, the Museum of Submarine Telegraphy near Penzance is an awesome geek-out experience.

My favorite Wired article of all time was the 1996 article written by Neal Stephenson all about undersea cables. I can’t believe I was able to find a link, but I may still have the physical copy someplace. That was an amazing example of long form writing and was my introduction to Stephenson.

https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

The moment I saw the subject I thought of the same article. It is one of the all time great articles of 'early modern' era of the net.

I really miss wired.

I got into the Internet with their 93 article by William Gibson where they sent him to Singapore.

It was a really neat place to have articles by people like Stephenson and Gibson.

Heh do you recall Mondo 2000

It was what wired was inspired by...

Also since we are on the topic: 2600 was a great phreaking resource back in the day... 2600 may still be going though...

I didn’t read Mondo 2000 in real time and I think found it on its last issue.

2600 is still going last I checked, along with monthly meetups in my mall.

'Disneyland With The Death Penalty':

https://www.wired.com/1993/04/gibson-2/

Another article which left a mark on me is Bruce Sterling's 'The Future? You don't want to know':

https://www.wired.com/1995/11/wired-scenarios-future-dont-wa...

In the original print edition, this was a tumult of mad typography, as well as an essay, which was a very Wired thing but taken to extremes. Appropriately for a cyberpunk writer, it may not entirely hang together logically, but it delivers a thrilling stream of eyeball kicks. I still remember the conclusion:

Real futurism means staring directly into your own grave and accepting the slow but thorough obliteration of everyone and everything you know and love.

Does this sound like fun? It can be.

Just don't expect it to move a lot of product.

Thanks for sharing! I remember enjoying the undersea cable plot in Cryptonomicon.

Inspired by another recent HN post about subsea cables, I'm currently reading The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage which walks through the history of the telegraph. It blows my mind that North America and Europe were connected by undersea cable before the start of the Civil War.

It's also part of his recent collection "Some remarks"

If you want to go back to where it all began, I recommend "A Thread Across the Ocean" by John Steele Gordon:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/410958.A_Thread_Across_t...

Andrew Blum's Ted talk https://youtu.be/XE_FPEFpHt4?t=292

If he thinks that's amazing. Tell him about how Five Eyes and Russia managed to tap those cables!

This is great. SA feels quite far away from the rest of the Internet (think 200ms) so anything that helps improve connectivity is a possive. Especially since this might foreshadow a local data center there. Azure has tech there. Google doesn't. Yet

Really? Sometimes when there is a problem with out of SA connectivity the only non-local websites that work are Google and YouTube. I’ve got 20ms ping times so Google must have a point of presence in SA.

I am gonna guess he meant a datacenter for Google Cloud. Google probably has their own points-of-presence for Google and YouTube.

Yes, it does, check out the network tab here: https://cloud.google.com/about/locations/

They have some sort of caching or CDN yes, but you can't spin up a gcp compute instance for example. Ie far away from a full blown cloud region.

Also the presence of local CDN doesn't imply Google presence. Eg the steam servers in SA are hosted by ISPs

Azure recently opened a datacenter, apparently AWS and GCP do not yet have one.

https://www.geekwire.com/2019/microsofts-south-african-data-...

We run stuff in a datacenter in Cape Town, and the quality of the connection to our C&C systems in Switzerland is sometimes awful bad - very slow, or routing issues where you have total black holes for minutes. We run similar workloads in the US and Singapore, but international connectivity is nowhere that bad. In spite of this, SA has an excellent tech scene and plenty of talent.

On the other hand, I feel younger seeing transfer rates in tens of kilobytes.... straight out of the roaring 90's.

That seems a little surprising. Certain residential areas in South Africa have gigabit fibre so I'd not expect kilobyte anything and certainly no total black holes from a respectable DC

Just annoyingly high latency and a bit of jitter and shitty pricing on local cloud stuff (though prob better now with azure)

We run lots of DC stuff in Cape Town and the connection to Europe is excellent. Which data center are you using? Something does not sound right here - perhaps faulty hardware, dodgy datacenter or similar. If you want, I can refer you several reputable providers.

"If you want, I can refer you several reputable providers."

In Cape Town? I would have thought the best/only provider would be Hetzner South Africa? If you could recommend more, of similar quality, that would be appreciated.

There are several. Teraco is probably the best, then you have IS, Liquid Telecom, Vox, Hetzner, Vodacom. I think those all have tier 3 DC's in CPT, but you should call them to confirm.

From AWS blog:

"(Amazon) will be opening an AWS Region in South Africa in the first half of 2020. The new Region will be based in Cape Town, will be comprised of three Availability Zones, and will give AWS customers and partners the ability to run their workloads and store their data in South Africa."

https://aws.amazon.com/es/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-region-...

This is going to be a private cable owned entirely by Google. Thus I think the main focus is on providing Google with connectivity for their services. While I would love to think that this will improve connectivity down there to Europe etc. I'm skeptical because it's Google.

This cable has a design capacity of ~320Tbps with 16 fiber pairs. The previously announced transatlantic cable, Dunant cable has 12 fiber pairs and a 250Tbps design capacity. These values could probably increase to around 480Tbps and 360Tbps with more advanced optical transmission equipment.

That kind of bandwidth capacity is almost unfathomable

Side question: why is the Middle East not connected to India in the map[1] over Google’s fiber?

[1] https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images...

https://submarine-cable-map-2019.telegeography.com/ shows it is connected. The number of cables going through the suez canal is notable.

> Once complete, Equiano will start in western Europe and run along the West Coast of Africa, between Portugal and South Africa, with branching units along the way that can be used to extend connectivity to additional African countries.

I understand how undersea cables are laid, but how do you make use of a "branching unit" once it's at the bottom of the sea? Send down a submersible to plug in the branch? Lift the cable back up, plug in the branch, and lower it again? Do they lay the cable with patch leads attached to the branching units, so you just have to dredge those up and plug the rest of the branch in?

I’ve seen photos of internet cables lifted onto ships to work on them. This article explains how one uses a massive robot to find them:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/subsea-internet-cable-ship-b...

I wonder if Google have plans for Cape Town? It is the most tech savvy city on the continent

They should. Amazon is hoovering up all the local talent currently

iirc a significant block of Amazon's tech was developed in Cape Town over the last decade or so.

Any examples?

The original version of EC2 (basically AWS) was built in Cape Town.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8549735

Related and a big reason for the existence of this new cable: https://www.skatelescope.org/

The Square Kilometre Array, on its initial phase, will have close to 200 dish radio telescopes and 130000 radio antennas working together in South Africa and Australia. The amount of data produced is predicted at 50% of all internet traffic (this was calculated 2 years ago, probably it changed a bit). A big part of that data will be distributed across the globe for science, being the main link originating in South Africa and ending up in Europe.

This will be the biggest scientific endeavor (by size) of mankind so far.

The Phase 2 of the SKA (for now just an idea), will increase the number of telescope dishes and antennas by a factor of 10.

Would this only be used for services l/sites that run on Google Cloud? Or does the entire Internet benefit directly

It's funded by Google completely according to TFA, and it's filed under "Infrastructure - Google Cloud Platform" - I'd hazard a guess that it's probably just for Google Cloud.

They might extend it for AMP sites, maybe..

I highly doubt that they would refuse to sell bandwidth if there is a market for it. It is a very valuable market.

Of course they sell it, though Google Cloud

I wonder if this signals that Space/Balloon/Satellite Internet is too far away? Or maybe it's just worth doing this anyway because there's no risk of Kessler Syndrome under the sea.

Great to read this. I’ve Experienced problems when the WACs cable goes down so anything to improve comms is good by me. How much better is optical switching btw?

Does it do EU in < 40ms?

No. Speed of light caps it to around 100ms theoretical if memory serves. With practical below 160 being unlikely

160-170ms RTT to Europe is common.

Surface distance Cape Town <-> London is 9673 km which corresponds to 33 ms rounded up at light speed (one way).

Surface distance Seattle <-> Berlin is 8143 km which corresponds to 28 ms rounded up at light speed (one way).

Now, these are distances when travelling across earth's curved surface. Neutrino canons or (quite impossible to ever build them) cables in earth's upper mantle would achieve even faster communication. Also, they correspond to direct connections and don't involve putting the cable into international waters far away from any government trying to get some extra bucks from you. The aerospace industry has to jump through a lot of hoops in order to be able to travel through airspace of a particular country.

>London is 9673 km

Closer to 15k via ocean hence the 100ms theoretical. The other 60ms is gear overhead.

But yeah if you could lay the cable as a crow flies then closer to 66

Anybody remember Google Fiber? Makes you wonder if this may be hit with similar issues. IE: it takes longer than they anticipated, it costs more than anticipated etc..

Last mile internet and backbone internet services are two different businesses operating by two different rules.

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