How does the internet connect between different countries?

I understand how things are connected without an ocean in between them, but how does it all connect with bodies of water separating them?

May be a stupid question, but it just popped into my head.

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networker050184

Submarine communications cable - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

chrisone

Satellites help out too. Also Remember the Bering Strait, it a short distance that pretty much connects the eastern continent with west continent via Alaska. So thats 85% of land mass connected over a small separation of water. I am sure they have a lot of Submarine communication cables running to Russia with this path since its a very short distance.

Bering Strait - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"the Bering Strait is approximately 53 miles (85 km) wide, with an average depth of 98–160 feet (30–49 m)."

Thats a very short distance and very shallow waters.

DevilWAH

Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I went here while I was on my honeymoon (romantic hey, and no I didn't drag her there, it was here Idea to go)

Not only does it (or at least did till it was moved a few yars ago) a Hugh amount of saterlight traffic, it also was involved in the laying of many of the transatlantic cables and is a grounding station for a few. I forget the exact number but it was amazing how much of the internet traffic the dishes could deal with in the event of a cable break.

Cable is preferred over Dishes due to the much lower latency and higher bandwidth it achieves.

MentholMoose

chrisone wrote: »

I am sure they have a lot of Submarine communication cables running to Russia with this path since its a very short distance.

There appears to be none:
Submarine Cable Map 2010: Maps: TeleGeography Research

The Internet connectivity in Alaska is minimal, they are even resorting to using stimulus money to build out some infrastructure:
Where $28 billion of broadband stimulus goes

kalebksp

MentholMoose wrote: »

There appears to be none:
Submarine Cable Map 2010: Maps: TeleGeography Research

The Internet connectivity in Alaska is minimal, they are even resorting to using stimulus money to build out some infrastructure:
Where $28 billion of broadband stimulus goes

It depends on where you are, in the "large" cities we have pretty good connectivity (per capita we're the most connected state). I have 10mb in my apartment (though it's ridiculously expensive) and our major sites at work have 100mb ME connections. We're getting more of our slightly rural sites on ME as well. Though we still have a bunch of 56k circuits around, and sometimes worse in the villages and islands.

I suspect it would be more expensive to run cables across the Bering Sea, Alaska is a big place and you have to get the fiber to the water. Alaska's internet connectivity is provided by several underwater fibers to from places like Valdez and Homer to Washington and Oregon. There are likely political issues with running it through Canada.

As for that article you linked to, people that have never been to these places have a hard time understanding what it's like. It may not benefit as many but the benefit to those areas is far greater than most of the other "rural" areas in the the lower 48.

chrisone

MentholMoose wrote: »

There appears to be none:
Submarine Cable Map 2010: Maps: TeleGeography Research

The Internet connectivity in Alaska is minimal, they are even resorting to using stimulus money to build out some infrastructure:
Where $28 billion of broadband stimulus goes

wow thats interesting , one would assume they would easily lay a huge vast amount of infrastructure there due to its small distance. I guess there is some political or environmental reason for not adding the infrastructure. Perhaps because its to shallow cables could be ripped apart by boats, subs, anchors, fishing boats? i dunno, maybe i will start up the first company to build such infrastructure.

Looks political though, the sub cables are not touching any communist territory. No china nor Russia.

MentholMoose

kalebksp wrote: »

It depends on where you are, in the "large" cities we have pretty good connectivity (per capita we're the most connected state). I have 10mb in my apartment (though it's ridiculously expensive) and our major sites at work have 100mb ME connections. We're getting more of our slightly rural sites on ME as well. Though we still have a bunch of 56k circuits around, and sometimes worse in the villages and islands.

I suspect it would be more expensive to run cables across the Bering Sea, Alaska is a big place and you have to get the fiber to the water. Alaska's internet connectivity is provided by several underwater fibers to from places like Valdez and Homer to Washington and Oregon. There are likely political issues with running it through Canada.

As for that article you linked to, people that have never been to these places have a hard time understanding what it's like. It may not benefit as many but the benefit to those areas is far greater than most of the other "rural" areas in the the lower 48.

I only intended to show that there is relatively low connectivity to the state, as demonstrated by the illustration on that link of the current and proposed undersea cables. Here's a less politically-charged report that shows Alaska is ranked 50th for broadband speed in the US (ahead of only Montana, Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico):
2009 Report on Internet Speeds in All 50 States | Speed Matters – Internet Speed Test

DevilWAH

It is also interesting how the Public IP address are split up. While place like the US and UK have large chunks of the public IP ranges. Some countries (I bel believe ive India was one) received a total of 255 adddress for the entire country!!!

A reason why these countries are ahead in the migration to IPv6, while the US lags behind at IPv4.

Kaminsky

You also get a lot of breaks in these cables from things like trawlers in the shallow areas like the English Channel. Last may I think, Colt lost one of it's two tunks to Europe due to a French trawler not reading the undersea charts properly.

There has also been many suspected terrorist attacks on the undersea cables in certain parts of the world. 2008 submarine cable disruption - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

DevilWAH

What I find really amazing is I have been on the beaches in corwall,

(such as here AC-2 (cable system: Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia Article)

and you know that there is a cable a few feet beneth you feet that is carrying thousands (possible millions) of connections both data and phone from across the sea in the US.

It to me just seems vulnerable, what if a kid making a sand castle digs through it ???

and this quote from (Optical fiber - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

"The current laboratory fiber optic data rate record, held by Bell Labs in Villarceaux, France, is multiplexing 155 channels, each carrying 100 Gb/s over a 7000 km fiber."

so a theoretical 15 Tbytes of data over a singel fibre in a single 7000km run... Now that's fast!! especially considering most most transatlantic cables are made up a a large bunch of many fibres together...

eMeS

chrisone wrote: »

wow thats interesting , one would assume they would easily lay a huge vast amount of infrastructure there due to its small distance. I guess there is some political or environmental reason for not adding the infrastructure. Perhaps because its to shallow cables could be ripped apart by boats, subs, anchors, fishing boats? i dunno, maybe i will start up the first company to build such infrastructure.

Looks political though, the sub cables are not touching any communist territory. No china nor Russia.

I would say it has something to do with their being mostly nothing on both sides of the Bering Strait.

MS

slinuxuzer

DevilWAH wrote: »

Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I used to work for the company that makes the panels that this is made out of, I actually used to assemble these panels, thank god I dont do that anymore.

kalebksp

DevilWAH wrote: »

It to me just seems vulnerable, what if a kid making a sand castle digs through it ???

Those cables carry a decent amount of electricity to power repeaters; he would probably be crispy before he hit the actual fiber.

Paul Boz

The under-sea cables get ripped up all the time. There were over 50 maintenance jobs to the trans-ATL cable last year alone. The Indian Ocean is also notoriously bad for vessels (and geologic events) ripping these guys up.

Anyone remember the Egyptian internet outage in December 2008 that pretty much left that whole region without service for several days? Here's a link to a similar break in January of 2008 that left much of the middle east without internet access for several days as well.

http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2008/01/30/44952.html

Also, earthquakes, volcanoes, and other significant geological events cause damage to the sea cables.

simbu

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L0gicB0mb508

Check out the OC-768 connection on Wiki. That's what a lot of your long hop underwater cabling is. I believe ATT upgraded to these not too long ago.

fly351

simbu wrote: »

I found here link for ip address...This site provides ip address,ip search,domain host search,get ip details....

spam bot?

DevilWAH

kalebksp wrote: »

Those cables carry a decent amount of electricity to power repeaters; he would probably be crispy before he hit the actual fiber.

LOL just Imagen the law suit..

"The current laboratory fiber optic data rate record, held by Bell Labs in Villarceaux, France, is multiplexing 155 channels, each carrying 100 Gb/s over a 7000 km fiber."

Not be long before repeaters are needed no more ...

I also read that there are plans to introduce generators that use tidal/water currents, to generate eccentricity to power the repeaters to save the large wastage of transmitting the current from land.

Paul Boz

I hate to raise threads from the dead, but this is pertinent:

Currently there's a damaged cable that interconnects Asia with western europe and north america. This isn't a full blown outage but it does represent a significant slowdown to these regions. Here are the bylines from the SWM NOC:

There's a cut in SWM4

*SMW4 Segment 4.1 cable fault*

Cable shunt fault developed on SMW4 segment 4.1 (Egypt / Alexandria –
Branching Unit #4A onward France / Marseilles) at 07:15GMT on 14-Apr. 2010.
However the shunt fault has further deteriorated and the cable segment was
down at 10:03GMT. Only four unprotected Singapore – London / Frankfurt
STM-4c IP trunks were being affected.

SMW4 NOC updated that there is a shunt fault in segment 4.1 between Egypt /
Alexandria and France / Marseilles with cable fault on Fiber Pair #2 at
1886.152 km from Alexandria towards Palermo. The traffic landed at Palermo
onwards to Europe was being affected, while the traffic running between
Alexandria and Marseilles via Fiber Pair #1 is still maintained.