

Eyeballing US Transatlantic Cable Landings - weinzierl
http://cryptome.org/eyeball/cable/cable-eyeball.htm

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pbbakkum
I love these maps for some reason. If you're interested in these, I've drawn a
chart of cable crossings at
[http://commonwealth.io/chart/5628626](http://commonwealth.io/chart/5628626).
This is backed with data in a public Mongo instance, which you can query by
pointing a Mongo driver to commonwealth.io port 27017.

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zrail
"Tubes: a Journey to the Center of the Internet" by Andrew Blum[1] examines
the transatlantic cables from a historical perspective, along with the rest of
the internet. It's not especially technical and he talks about a dead squirrel
maybe a few too many times, but it's a pretty good read. I wrote a review
about it a month ago[2].

[1]: [http://www.amazon.com/Tubes-A-Journey-Center-
Internet/dp/006...](http://www.amazon.com/Tubes-A-Journey-Center-
Internet/dp/0061994952) [2]: [http://www.petekeen.com/book-review-tubes-a-
journey-to-the-c...](http://www.petekeen.com/book-review-tubes-a-journey-to-
the-center-of-the-internet)

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rdl
My favorite story about cables is Neal Stephenson's piece in Wired:
[http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html](http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html)

(I was actually looking at doing a 300 nautical mile repeaterless fiber system
in the ~1999-2001 period. It looks like if you lay during an economic downturn
when there's plenty of spare capacity in cableships and surplus cable, it's
not actually _that_ expensive. The problem is short cables tend to be in
shallow water where there are lots of "issues", so you need armored or buried
cable, which is much more expensive.

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jdp23
Great blast from the past:

 _Several of the transatlantic telecommunication companies -- Global Crossing,
Tyco, Worldcom -- are in financial difficulty due to alleged deceptive
accounting practices_

Hey, I remember them!

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hindsightbias
Worldcom was a huge NeXT fanboi site. IB T3 line building on the fly. Made a
great intel community box.

~~~
jey
What does "IB T3 line building" mean? The only part I could parse was "T3
line".

~~~
hindsightbias
Sorry, Interface Builder. They could drag-and-drop capacity on the fly.

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denisnazarov
So this is where the internet comes in to the East Coast? Was it completely
unaffected by hurricane Sandy?

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mpyne
The cables were already underwater, what's a few more feet of storm surge to
them?

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jevinskie
Well the buildings that they land in may not like water that much. =)

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akiselev
I believe the cables are dug underground as they approach land. It would be
too easy to cut in shallow waters otherwise.

~~~
rdl
It's progressive, going from just anti-shark/power carrying sheath in the deep
ocean to light steel cable armor a ways out to trenched as it approaches the
shore itself. They splice the cable together according to a specific plan
based on a survey (first desktop, then underwater) to account for underwater
terrain and risks.

