How does internet traffice reach other other continents parted by the oceans?

I'm just curious and am not sure how to word this for google. Does internet traffic get passed through some satellite and then passed to say, Europe? Or is there some really long cable strung along the atlantic?

I hope this isn't a dumb question!

EDIT: Err... a bit more searching and I think have found my answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Cross_Cable

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networker050184

They basically lay undersea cable from one continent to the next with some repeaters thrown in there. You can find some maps fairly easy on google searching for undersea internet cable map or something along those lines.

Trifidw

Satellite links will be too slow, instead there are fibre cables connecting up the continents.

http://kelsocartography.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/seacablehi.jpg

chrisone

^Yep and sometimes ships rip the cables on accident. Its a common accident with the sea trunks.

DevilWAH

Trifidw wrote: »

Satellite links will be too slow, instead there are fibre cables connecting up the continents.

http://kelsocartography.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/seacablehi.jpg

While it is true 99.9% of traffic is through fibre optic cables strung across the ocean floor, there are still uses for satellite links across the world. Especially where the landmass may not yet be connected, or you are out side of cities such as in the middle of a desert or war zone.

Both satellite links and fibre-optic cable (in fact almost all network infrastructure), the signal travels at the speed (with out nit picking) of light. And while the distance to a satellite may be further than the fibre optics one of the latest systems has a latency of 7ms with 1.5gbit throughput per connection and some systems have total throughput in the 60-70gbit range although there delay is generaly more around the 500-600ms each way.

The added benefit is you can receive this service unrestricted allowing you move any where on the planet as long as you have line of site to the satellite. So for research applications and the military using satellites is common practice where a dealy is acceptable or low bandwidth is acceptable.

At the other end of the scale you have compinies such as financial banks where delay means every thing. for them even a few ms can meen the difference between making or losing millions. some will pay £300 million to cut the latency from 65 to 59ms!!

The $300m cable that will save traders milliseconds - Telegraph
Transatlantic communications cable - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The fibre optic repeaters them selves can introduce delay and in-cress cost of running the line (cables have to have power fed to them to power the repeaters), so one holy grail is to produce a cable that can send a single 3,000 miles with out one, allowing a much lighter weight of cable to be laid, that will both be faster, higher bandwidth and much lower running costs.

So for most every day traffic (such as home internet and company data) fibre optics is the way to go with huge multi Tbit bandwidths an low latency. But there are other ways for more specialised applications.

DevilWAH

chrisone wrote: »

^Yep and sometimes ships rip the cables on accident. Its a common accident with the sea trunks.

Indeed cable is often only buried beneath the sea bed close to shore, (on the contential shelf's), once out in the deep see it is just allowed to sink to the bottom as it is unlikely to be disturbed 3 or 4 miles down and with undersea valleys and mountines it is almost impossible to dig trenches to bury it in.

How ‘Globe’ Repairs Underwater Fiber Optic Line ~ eRipplesCebu.com - Cebu's Podcast has a few videos of them laying cable.

and here is one coming ashore

Web in trouble? The hidden cables under a Cornish beach feeding the world's internet | Mail Online, only burried a few feet down, you may be walking over millions of internet connections as you stroll along the beach.

In fact the last link is a decent artical about Fibre optics as a whole and how they mesure up to the growing needs of the internet.

PsychoFin

When I used to work for a very big telco, in their NOC, we often dealt with cuts in the SEA-ME-WE 3 cable. This is the longest optical submarine telecom cable in the world, linking south east asia, middle east and western europe together. There is a wiki article that shows how the cable is connected and that lists all the major outages. Lots of different carriers own parts of this cable and it is pretty interesting what happens when there is a cut. It's big business to send a ship to a cable cut/break to fix it. It can take days not counting storms and other obstacles

Cheers,
Fin

powerfool

When the Cisco Catalyst 3750 was released, I had visions of creating my own Atlantic fiber ring following the coastline, using port-channels and layer 3 capabilities on a 12-port gigabit system... 3 port channels of 4 Gbps each, two linking to the ring, and the third to the PoP.

Ah, I was was younger then... but I was going to try and miss most of the ocean... going up through Canada, Greenland, Iceland, on to Ireland, England, and France. It was going to be sweet.

Whiteout

CodeBlox wrote: »

I'm just curious and am not sure how to word this for google. Does internet traffic get passed through some satellite and then passed to say, Europe? Or is there some really long cable strung along the atlantic?

I hope this isn't a dumb question!

EDIT: Err... a bit more searching and I have found my answer, I think: Southern Cross Cable - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thread can be deleted if necessary

Excellent question, got me thinking as well! Dug a little deeper and read about Cable Laying Ships, pretty cool stuff.

joshmadakor

powerfool wrote: »

It was going to be sweet.

Hahaha

Everyone

The first successful transatlantic cable was completed in 1858. As I'm sure you should be able to guess by the date here, that was for telegraph use. As much as I hate linking to Wikipedia as a reference... since a few others already did here: Transatlantic telegraph cable - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It took 2 minutes to send a single character across it!

CodeBlox

Very interesting! Thanks for the really informative responses. Wow, 300 million only to slightly improve latency?? Talk about serious SLAs. And those are some fast links. I just assumed they weren't anywhere as fast as 80gbps. In the posted image by Trifidw, it says a few of the links have a bandwidth of 1tbps. Talk about some serious juice!

DevilWAH

Everyone wrote: »

The first successful transatlantic cable was completed in 1858. As I'm sure you should be able to guess by the date here, that was for telegraph use. As much as I hate linking to Wikipedia as a reference... since a few others already did here: Transatlantic telegraph cable - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It took 2 minutes to send a single character across it!

Some of the early cables came ashore in Cornwall UK. I spent part of my honeymoon a few years ago down there, and we went to
Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

At the time it had a great visitors centre, and lots of info about the early (and modern) cables including examples of that first cable. and the whole history of how transatlantic communications have developed.

You know you meet the right women when she takes you to a satellite earthing station for your honeymoon, and gets excited about it as you

You also know your both a bit geeky

DevilWAH

powerfool wrote: »

When the Cisco Catalyst 3750 was released, I had visions of creating my own Atlantic fiber ring following the coastline, using port-channels and layer 3 capabilities on a 12-port gigabit system... 3 port channels of 4 Gbps each, two linking to the ring, and the third to the PoP.

Ah, I was was younger then... but I was going to try and miss most of the ocean... going up through Canada, Greenland, Iceland, on to Ireland, England, and France. It was going to be sweet.

What I think is great is that if you do ever see the termination of these cables, they are often only a few strands of fibre (4 or 8 maybe), they have travelled thousands of miles across the seabed, and the end up running in to a small shack on the beach, where inside they terminate to some of the shelf patch panel and in to what is really not much more than a 3750. and that's about all there is to it. You expect some thing a little granded considering maybe a third of the internet is running through it. its slightly underwhelming to say the least.

Bl8ckr0uter

chrisone wrote: »

^Yep and sometimes ships rip the cables on accident. Its a common accident with the sea trunks.

I did not know this. Good information.

gorebrush

Back in the 60's and 70's my father used to sail on the ships that laid cables and things. He was a radio officer in charge of communications between ships and shore etc etc.

aquilla

I'm surprised no one has posted a link to this - Greg's Cable Map - showing the current undersea cables, where they stop and their capacity.

Everyone

aquilla wrote: »

I'm surprised no one has posted a link to this - Greg's Cable Map - showing the current undersea cables, where they stop and their capacity.

Pretty cool. Crazy to think how we now have multiple cables that can do several Tbps running across the ocean, when the 1st cable to cross (the telegraph one I mentioned earlier) could only transmit a single character every 2 minutes!

aquilla

There is a new cable planned for 2013 between Ireland - New York with a spur to Iceland thanks to Emerald Networks.

"The cable will have a transmission rate of 100 Gbps per channel with an expected latnecy of less than 62 milliseconds round trip from New York to London."

"Emerald Networks' fiber optic cable is designed at 100 waves x 100 Gbps per Fiber Pair (60Tbit total transatlantic design capacity)"

Source:- New Atlantic cable will start operating in 2013 | Datacenter Dynamics

DevilWAH

History of the Atlantic Cable & Submarine Telegraphy gives a lot on the history of the cables right form the mid 1800's when it all started.

And you might be surprised to see the number of cable that where already in place by 1901, remember this is copper cable not the moden Fibre optic used now. But still an incredible feat of engineering.
1901 Map of cables

TheShadow

aquilla wrote: »

I'm surprised no one has posted a link to this - Greg's Cable Map - showing the current undersea cables, where they stop and their capacity.

I had lost that link. Glad to find it again, thank you. I was always suprised that there was no direct sea cable to Russia. Considering the trouble that million gallons in heating oil is having getting from Russia to Nome Alaska maybe the logististics do no favor it.

rwmidl

On Discovery (or History channel) I saw a program one time on the laying of some undersea cable from Costa Rica and they spliced in to a main trunk in the pacific (they had a robot that dug a trench, layed the cable and then buried it). It was a neat program.

On another note - a few years ago I worked at an international company and there was an earthquake off the coast of Taiwan that severed an undersea cable. Our US office lost communication with an office in China were we sent documents to be processed. The documents manager was tearing us (IT) up because we couldn't immediately "fix" the cable that was cut (I don't remember if it was possible to re-route internet traffic or not...it was a few years ago and I don't remember the details).

darkerz

A few weeks ago, I saw a job posting for "Sr. Continental Network Engineer".

If you can achieve that and "Sr. Satellite Network Architect" by 50, I think that's when you look back and go "And to think, it all started as a small lab 30 years ago on a forum called Techexams".

Got to dream big.

ENGINEER. THE WORLD.