Submarine cable repair
Ever wonder how broken undersea cables get repaired? A few interesting links were posted to the NANOG mailing list last month, including a series of YouTube videos produced by Hibernia Atlantic onboard Global Marine's Cable Innovator. My favorite is this one demonstrating how the individual fibers are prepared and spliced together:
Other videos in the series demonstrate (in no particular order):
- Cable dropping and pick-up
- Cable molding/reinstating
- Cable wheel tension
- The cable tanks
- The test room
- The power feed room
- The rover
Interesting stuff. Alcatel also has a couple nifty Flash videos demonstrating how cables are laid and retrieved for repair.
About the Author
Jeremy Stretch is a freelance networking engineer, instructor, and the maintainer of PacketLife.net. He currently lives in Fairfax, Virginia, on the edge of the Washington, DC metro area. Although primarily an R&S guy, he likes to get into everything, and runs a free network training lab out of his basement for fun. You can contact him by email or follow him on Twitter.
Comments
If you are curious about the process that goes into deploying a submarine cable. You can follow the one, that the company I work for is building.
Cable between egypt and tunisia has just been broken :( This kind of ship was already there to repair the damaged fiber cable , but earth moved elsewhere and they had to start again :( So France and Europe must be re routed to the US if they want to reach the whole Asia !! That must be a lot of traffic !
Thanks for the Video Stretch !
Nicolas
Thats pretty cool, I have often wondered why cables dont break more often on the bottom of the ocean. My imagination certainly thinks the bottom of the ocean is a much more horrible place then it probably is. Guess I have seen Abyss and Leviethan too many times.
Watching that first video I couldnt help but think "how many sailors does it take to splice one piece of fiber together?" :p
e-
Where can I get a map of the internet links with some detail? I would like to have a worldmap of the real internet links including sat links to know how my packets travel around the world. It would be great to know more about this ..is so virtual for us..
Th PPC 1 Blog is tons of fun, but these video are equally cool.
Kevin, check out this link
Not entirely sure if this is every cable but its the only decent source I've come accross. Maybe someone has a better source?
This stuff is always fascinating to see how it's done, unfortunately I'm at work and i'm in the drawing pretty diagrams area of IT so I don't have access to the videos at the moment, look forward to watching them when I get home.