Hacker News Reader

Comment by booi | Hacker News Reader

Generally it can be fixed in days. They raise it from the sea floor and splice in a new cable section.

True but ships and crews with the equipment to do the repairs are limited. It's possible to overwhelm the repair capacities. Also, it takes time to physically travel between cuts so while cuts in the Baltic might take a week or two to fix, a cut in the Atlantic and one in the Baltic may take a week or two just for travel.

If someone will try to overwhelm the repair capacities for integral communications, they'll be dealt with like pirates - simply sunk and be done with.

As if they know which ship did this…

They already know. The captain will probably end up in prison for a long time, and company which owns the ship will pay for the deliberate damage. Would be good too if they can crack who from the crew works for Russian saboteurs besides the captain. Unlikely it's just one person.

Crazy that you can splice optical cable..

They actually have very cool devices that will automatically align and fuse two fibers and estimate the loss of the bond.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP_C0XLLyR0

how much do one of those bad boys cost?

The cheapest ones are surprisingly cheap at less than $1,000 and the highest end ones are $10,000

Today, we're going to talk to John Owens and learn about the process of splicing fiber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zN20ZVInfU

I mean… they get terminated somehow, right?

True, but splicing without leaving behind a powered repeater is different from the final termination with active electronics on the end.

It's pretty cool tech

I’m saying you can terminate cleanly without needing a repeater.

To be clear, I’m saying to terminate each end of the cut cable to a terminating device that continues the flow of light, not just the termination at the beginning/end of the line. Sorry if that wasn’t obvious.

Why is it crazy? It's been done since there has been optical cable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com