I was reading an article in the Economist about a new fiber route down the Red Sea from Israel and wondered if there were any branches off of those lines and where the routers were for them. The route kind of made it look like it was completely at sea, but it would kind of make sense to leave them at sea if you could put a router there.
Mike
it look like it was completely at sea, but it would kind of make sense
to leave them at sea if you could put a router there.
First thing that comes to mind is power, how would you power them?
Undersea cables absolutely carry power along with the fiber. It is needed for inline amplifiers.
-Andy
It appears that Jerry Cloe <jerry@jtcloe.net> said:
-=-=-=-=-=-
it look like it was completely at sea, but it would kind of make sense
to leave them at sea if you could put a router there.First thing that comes to mind is power, how would you power them?
Undersea cables have had power for repeaters since TAT-1 in 1956. I
think we can consider that to be a solved problem.
R's,
John
Hydroelectricity (or wave energy), *obviously*. Sheesh.
Regards, K.
High voltage DC from landing stations to the underwater amps and submarine branching units.
jms
John’s probably seen this but I think it addresses power on cables and branching nodes (which are just optical /roadm devices)
Surprisingly it is power that primarily limits repeater count in undersea spans.
Ie, most available power is going to be eaten up budget wise by the repeaters, leaving none for routers.
It’s not terribly clear that a router would substantially benefit things that a ROADM could not also accomplish, and those do exist in undersea systems.
As routers decrease in power and coalesce with silicon photonics, this may change.
-LB
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First thing that comes to mind is power, how would you power them?
The first answer that came to my mind was Raman amplification. It is
powered by a beam of light and the fiber itself is the amplifier.
Of course, there are no Raman Routers.
Schroedinger Routers .. now that's what I want to see. Deflection routing
taken to its logical conclusion. But you can never tell if it worked or not.
$ dump bgp .. just by the act of seeing routes will have changed them.
-- //Shrikumar
Yes, you can. But you can't see if they are *working*.
Regards, K.
I was reading an article in the Economist about a new fiber route down the Red Sea from Israel and wondered if there were any branches off of those lines and where the routers were for them. The route kind of made it look like it was completely at sea, but it would kind of make sense to leave them at sea if you could put a router there.
There's a limited number of possible branches on a cable and as a result you just put the routers on the edges rather than in the middle. What you do put in the water is something like:
The more the active electronics are at the ends rather than in the open ocean the greater the serviceability is and also over the lifetime of the cable the easier it is to upgrade it to higher capacity as the data bearing capacity of a given wavelength increases. The FLAG cable has had for example has has several capacity increases over it's service life which closing in on 25 years at this point.
Amplifiers are still necessary for longer spans but a lot of other logic is not. for situations where the distances are manageable passive unrepeated systems are greatly prefered because it keeps servicing due to electronic faults to a minimum and reduces the cost accordingly. see the recent tonga cable fault and repair for a passive system.
The mean depth of the worlds oceans is around ~3700 meters below MSL which means most service calls involve deploying to the proximate location of the fault, fishing around for a while and then carefully re-laying several kilometers of cable on a splice has been made. which typically takes weeks.
I was reading an article in the Economist about a new fiber route down the Red Sea from Israel and wondered if there were any branches off of those lines and where the routers were for them. The route kind of made it look like it was completely at sea, but it would kind of make sense to leave them at sea if you could put a router there.
The NSA taps aren't really routers per se but networking devices nonetheless.
- Ethan
And lots, and lots of $$.
Mark.
>
> The mean depth of the worlds oceans is around ~3700 meters below MSL
> which means most service calls involve deploying to the proximate
> location of the fault, fishing around for a while and then carefully
> re-laying several kilometers of cable on a splice has been made.
> which typically takes weeks.And lots, and lots of $$.
Just arrange for a volcano to go off, and splice then.