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Comment by jgrahamc | Hacker News Reader

Why are there so many submarine cables going between Alaska and the continental US? Does the US not trust Canada to have land based cables, or is it actually better to go under the sea for that link?

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There might be regulatory concerns involved in routing the cables, or maybe the investors simply had a more straightforward path in raising money for the project by pitching it as a domestic project. As you can see if you zoom in on the map, those connections are labeled (top to bottom, or if you will, north to south in map presentation)

Alaska United East

NorthStar

Alaska United West

and

ACS Alaska-Oregon

and at least three of those lines have connections to Canada via British Columbia (as can be seen in the zoomed-in view). And of course a map labeled "Submarine Cable Map" will by definition not show the many land connections that surely exist between the United States and Canada.

So it seems to me that nothing about the cable architecture here indicates mistrust of Canada on the part of the United States (or the other way around), but just a presentation decision on the part of the map-maker.

(I'm writing this from one of the states of the United States that borders Canada. I've done limited travel in Canada. Sure enough, the one time I stayed several days in Alaska with my wife we overflew Canada, doing a direct nonstop flight from Minneapolis to Anchorage. I've been in the air over Canada en route between the United States and east Asia almost as much as I've been on the ground in our friendly neighbor to the north.)

After edit: And of course, as two other replies noted, cost and engineering ease of laying cables on the seabed rather than across a mountain range may make a great deal of difference. Thanks for adding that issue to the discussion while I was typing.

Complete guess, but it might be harder to maintain overland cables running through the Rockies than undersea cables.

I think that's a good guess. Alaska contains some pretty gnarly terrain, including (but not limited to) a fair number of glaciers.

As does much of B.C., which you'd have to cross on the land route to Alaska.

Alaska is also the location of a whole lot of cold war military installations. It was an anchor of Strategic Air Command during its heydey. It wouldn't surprise me if some of this redundancy was for weapons control systems.

The land route to Canada is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Highway

It is not an easy, nor accessible route, and it gets you to Fairbanks, in any event - from there you'd have to double back down to Anchorage.

I could easily see undersea cables with a bit of ice at the end being easier to deal with than cables laid in permafrost in an extremely harsh landscape, with large temperature fluctuations throughout the year.

Sea is cheaper. Land links require roads for the trucks to drive on and much more labour than sea links.

If this was true, wouldn't we see more links between cities on the NE coast and in the gulf of mexico? I was always under the impression we ran fiber along railroad routes.

I don't know US geography that well but it isn't a universal rule. Africa (cheap labour + under developed), for example, has many coastal cities linked by sea not land.

That is primarily because the cables get stolen or cut in those parts of the world. It's VERY hard to steal an undersea cable...

Land is cheaper when you are running though developed areas. But these areas of Alaska and Canada are desolate, you would first have to develop them and that is way more expensive then running undersea cable.

Also, I speculate that undersea cable is more resilient to seasonal freezing and thawing.

The eastern seaboard of the U.S. is much more hospitable and stable terrain. Alaska includes some pretty gnarly mountain ranges and a fair number of glaciers.

We do, kind of.

Note the links between Florida and the Yucatan peninsula. There are also some "hops" along the west cost of the US and many in South America.

Undersea cables make a lot of sense when you need to cover a lot of ground without a lot of interconnects in-between. For example, in the NE United States, the nodes are too close together for an undersea cable to make sense. There are many points of connection very close together, with well established infrastructure that can house the cabling on land. On the West Coast, you have long distances in-between without much infrastructure. For example, between LA and San Fran, you've also got Big Sur. There's nothing requiring a fat pipe in that distance, so running a cable out to sea means not negotiating perpetual land-use rights all the way up the coast.

Ok, I'll be the one to say it: Canadians and cables don't mix. They chew on the insulation and short the thing out. Pretty soon you're looking at a broken cable and a fried Canuck.

Mmm mmm mmmmm fried Canuck! Granny, heat up the stove!

Easy, so we can spy on Russian traffic.

NB: I one thing I notice is how few undersea links Russia has. There's a run to Japan, one to Finland, and a few through the Caucuses. Otherwise, Russian overseas network traffic is almost wholly dependent on third-party links.

Also impressed by India's connections. And of course, the NYC-London linkages.

Russia has lots of countries bordering it, so I'm guessing plenty go through other countries and then run along the rail networks.

I was in a city which was a couple of hundred k's from the next town or rail connection and they had pretty good broadband from what I could tell.

Feel sorry for us Kiwi's, only one cable (the southern cross) active at the moment.

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