Boffins ready to demo 1.44 petabit-per-second fibre cables Today's international optical systems carry impressive quantities of data, but as 'net traffic continues to grow they'll likely run out of capacity. That's had boffins working on ways to pack more spatial paths inside the fibres, so if you were laying a twelve-pair cable across the Atlantic, you'd get multiple paths per fibre …
"We can either build more submarine cables or more efficient submarine cables"
What?! Either is very much the wrong word there.
First off "More efficient submarine cables" is a subset of the group "more submarine cables" the statement above is logically impossible you can't build more efficient cables unless you build at least one more cable for that more efficient one to exist.
Secondly the statement of "either" implies that if we make a more efficient cable we won't need to lay anymore of them, however history doesn't support that argument our data usage has rapidly increased over time and will certainly continue to do so, and given that this innovation will take 10 years to be ready it likely won't seem as impressive by the time it is.
The shipping container full of micro SD cards is NOT a unit of bandwidth as it has the dimension of bytes, not bytes/second.
So how fast has a container full of micro SD cards to move to match the 1.44 peta-bit/s fiber? A standard shipping container can hold about 10^8 µSD cards with say 32 GByte each. That is 25600 Petabits/container. Optical signal travel at 200000 km/s. Thus the container has to move at 11.25 km/s (40500 km/h) to match the new optical fiber. That is more than 11.186 km/s, the escape velocity from Earth.
The people who own navies are pretty much the only ones who can cut undersea cables. Unfortunately they are also the ones most likely to feel the motivation. While there are a few individual decent people in governments, the latter as a whole behave like paranoid sociopaths - and that's even before the Orange Idiot came along.
I think I'd like to see more cables, over a variety of routes, plus more methods for carrying web traffic by other means.
Example: If the cretin in the White House blunders his way into trouble with China over Taiwan, and if China decides on a partial (withdrawable, deniable, de-escalatable) blockade of Taiwan, don't you think the latter's cables will be severed pronto?
Honestly I don't think cable cutting is a huge threat to any nation.
I can't speak for every country, but I'm fairly confident most have more than one route in and out data wise, so cutting them off would be quite time consuming.
More importantly though, particularly when it comes to the major superpowers, they'd rather have their enemies online so they can perform cyber attacks on them.
"The people who own navies are pretty much the only ones who can cut undersea cables."
Experience shows that it's the people who own ship anchors and/or deep trawl rigs
Whilst the navies subset might have motivation, the reality is more depressingly mundane and regular.
@Alan ""The people who own navies are pretty much the only ones who can cut undersea cables."
Experience shows that it's the people who own ship anchors and/or deep trawl rigs"
What he said. Back in the ‘80s when I worked on submarine cables (copper not fibre) trawlers dragging their anchors nearly isolated the UK. There were all sorts of tortuous re-routes and communications to the US had to go via satellite. Coincidentally BT engineers were on strike at the time...
I would settle for all the fibre that has recently been: nstalled on this island to function at several Mb/s rather than the Kbs I often get, paeticularly when it is raining and there are no microwave transmitters involved. Can they perfect waterproof optical cable first?
I have a suspicion that the fibre has not actually been connected, when it rains everyone stays inside and turns on the internet so the bandwidth drops/clogs up.
What you are probably experiencing here is what is know commonly as "ugh it's wet I am going to stay in and go online" your contention ratio then hits max and the line fibre that BT installed expecting only 5 of those 50 to be online doing anything at oncecannot cope with all 50 at any reasonable speed.
Or it could be that it is FTTC instead and it's your copper getting wet as light going through a sealed cable does not tend to get affected by rain.
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