Finnish and Russian comms giants shake hands on submarine cable across Arctic Sea Finnish network operator Cinia and Russian mobile giant MegaFon are planning to lay a telecommunications cable across the Arctic Sea. The two companies have signed a memorandum of understanding, expecting to enter a joint venture in the fourth quarter of the year. The 10,000km Arctic Connect cable would stretch from Helsinki …
I have a Russian friend who works on a rig based in Archangelsk, great money but going by his photos the place is like an alien land/seascape, where if you are caught outside in winter you can freeze to death in minutes in some weather and that's if a polar besr doesn't eat you first.
It will also be a new game for the Royal Nayy to find that cable and tap it, though I think quite a lot of that sea is quite shallow so maybe not too much room for a sub to manoeuvre in.
Not necessarily so simple. So system's probably going to be a 'festoon' style cable with links going in & out of landing stations along the route. That can simplify things like feeding power & maintenance compared to wet bits that may need an ice breaker before you can try yoinking up the cable to fix it. Or if it's being sold as a low-latency system, may have wet branching units spurring off to landing stations and some 'express' fibres for Europe-Asia traffic.
So not always as easy as tapping the end points, unless you're curious what hentai's popular with bored Russians accessing pron in Japan. The more interesting stuff in theory should be provisioned between landing stations, ie Russian Arctic bases along the coastline, so being able to tap that without TPTB noticing. Or if you're Russia, endpoints in Russia would need to comply with Russian telecommunications licences, which have some pretty stringent conditions. Especially given current geopolitical pressures, sanctions etc etc.
One of the problems with maps using mercator projection, such as the one used to illustrate this story, is that it greatly exaggerates distances at the Poles. The picture implies that the distances involved are much longer than they actually are. Which degrades the point of the story rather.
The Arctic Passages - both Northwest and Northeast - are things of legend. Of gruelling and disastrous adventure. Not to be sneezed at. I guess they must have their reasons for cabling at sea rather than overland (shorter overall distance? Siberian conditions the bigger maintenance nightmare?)
And in these times, nice to hear there are parts of the world where Western and Eastern companies can still do business cooperatively and apparently unencumbered by screaming politicians.
You SAY "no moderation needed", but the hangover caused by all that vodka means the average time for one of my posts to go live this year has gone from under 1 hour to in excess of 10 hours.
Some posts I make before leaving for work early in the morning arent live until the following day, and one was recently "Rejected", despite containing no swear words, racist, homophobic or other-bic statements.
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