
Geek heroes rescue Tonga from worst case fibre optic cable blackout - theBashShell
https://matangitonga.to/2019/01/26/geek-heroes-rescue-tonga-worst%20case
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DoreenMichele
This is great news and I am glad to see it.

Internet access is a big deal for Tonga and they went to pains to establish
good internet access to begin with, which articles about the crisis seem to
not really make very clear:

 _Here 's how a tiny Pacific island got better Internet than the US_

[https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-08-01/heres-how-tiny-
pacifi...](https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-08-01/heres-how-tiny-pacific-
island-got-better-internet-us)

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NelsonMinar
What a great story, a mix of quick hacking know-how, cooperation, and some
good luck / remarkable foresight: "Fortunately for Tonga, EziNET had
previously imported all the parts for a new satellite antenna that they were
planning to install in March 2019. It was slow going because they had not been
able to interest anyone in backing a Satellite Plan B for the country."

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walrus01
Temporary access via fixed aim vsat terminal and geostationary C or Ku band
transponder capacity is actually a lot more expensive than o3b services, in $
per Mbps. But an o3b terminal is much costlier in terms of initial purchase
cost, and perhaps this project doesn't meet the Mbps threshold or contract
term length to make it worthwhile.

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d3lvox
Kudos to the guys!

The almost-outage as seen from global routing:

[https://stat.ripe.net/widget/country-routing-
stats#w.resourc...](https://stat.ripe.net/widget/country-routing-
stats#w.resource=to&w.zoom_start=1547208000000&w.zoom_end=1548586800000&w.comparison=no)

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ggm
Cable ship in Noumea. Switched contacts from Alcatel to somebody else but at
least there's one within the right hemisphere.

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walrus01
There are always cable ships somewhere in the Pacific, on standby, for the
jointly funded cable maintenance agreements. At any given time you can find
one somewhere on the US west coast, or perhaps in port in Victoria or
Vancouver. Same for the other side of the ocean.

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ggm
Noumea to Tonga is a lot shorter!

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incompatible
It's a bit suspicious that it would break in two places at once. There was a
panic in 2015 about Russian ships and submarines supposedly placed to be able
to cut cables. You can imagine the havoc they could cause if they carried that
out, perhaps combined with destroying a few satellites.

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erentz
It’s not as unusual as you might think. Random failures can cluster. It’s why
two paths is never enough if redundancy matters.

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Arnt
Adding to that, the two cables are constrained by having the same endpoint and
needing not-too-steep paths through the same landscape on the ocean bottom.

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perl4ever
I read that as "Greek heroes" at first.

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redwood
I couldn't help but read that as "Greek heroes" at first and was really
confused

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mitchtbaum
Yup.. Geek heroes come from every ethnicity, but only the Greek ones get
credit. It's a known issue.

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Mtinie
Linguistic off-by-one errors!

