Hacker News Reader

Comment by msmith | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

There's another one that appears to run through the Gulf of Mexico to the US as well (looks like AL or LA to TX), so I suspect it's surprisingly cheaper and/or easier to get policy approval.

It's not entirely uncommon to route cables from and to your own country through the water, apparently: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_domestic_submarine_c...

Well, it's also easier to run a cable underwater. As far as I know, the cables are literally just laid down there. You can't just lay a cable on land. You've got to bury it or elevate it on poles. I wonder how they deal with dredging the canal, though.

per another comment[0], it's cheaper to just stay in the water unless you specifically want to attach to a land network. I don't have the knowledge the other commenter seems to have, but that certainly seems believable to me.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28642764

Likewise, what's the "benefit" of spreading the cables out by a few kilometers when space allows? If you zoom in you can see all the cables scrunched through the canal, but on more than one occasion they are fanned out to spread evenly across the given space. Likely it is only a visual eyecandy in the way this map was created, and not a true indication of the cable formations... but I tried looking for some answers on https://www.iscpc.org and gave up. I would assume once a suitable cable path is found, most subsequent cables would be laid right alongside for higher chance of success avoiding coral/trenches/etc.

edit: The more I look at the map, the more it becomes clear these lines do not indicate true cable locations. The lines are too perfect... even for fiber optics. The ocean floor is a treacherous beast!

that also increases the chance of something hitting a cable taking out multiple cables at the same time.

Just guessing, but the benefit could be not cutting a cable by accident as you lay yours?

Land almost everywhere comes with ownership issues which can be problematic for installing cables. The ocean is generally unambiguously nationally owned, and so it's much simpler to seek permission from a single source (government) than many sources (owners).

Is there any map of land cables ? I know more about the few submarine cables between south and north america than how the internet actually arrives to inland cities of my state.

working at a tier one telco. we have very precise maps of our ground fibers. physical location is usually down to +-10cm. length of fiber even takes into account any coiled up parts. if a contractor wants to dig anywhere, then they have the responsibility to query a national database before digging. if they break our cable, then we have active monitoring (reflecting a laser in a spare fiber, off the break, calculating length to break) this interfaces with our map software, so we can tell within half a meter where the cable is broken. in most cases we end up suing the contractor for the cost of repair and any SLA payments.

to my knowledge no public maps exist, that will give you a full picture.

As far as I can tell, there aren't that many cable running through the actual canal, instead they cross over Egypt before the canal starts or terminate in Suez: https://ibb.co/NyVXtST

I'm not sure about the Suez, but is the reason why there are almost 0 cables running on the African continent and instead there being several cables laid around the coast.

they don't go through the suez canal, they go across egypt by land.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com