How the Internet travels across oceans

Note: Cables shown in the map are ones that are currently in use, planned or being constructed.

They do not show cables that were decommissioned.

The content providers comprise cables publicly announced that Apple, Google, Microsoft or Netflix partly own, solely own or are a major capacity buyer of a cable owned by another company.

Source: TeleGeography

From NY Times by Adam Satariano

‘People think that data is in the cloud, but it’s not. It’s in the ocean.’ 

The internet consists of tiny bits of code that move around the world, traveling along wires as thin as a strand of hair strung across the ocean floor.
The data zips from New York to Sydney, from Hong Kong to London, in the time it takes you to read this word.

Nearly 750,000 miles of cable already connect the continents to support our insatiable demand for communication and entertainment.
Companies have typically pooled their resources to collaborate on undersea cable projects, like a freeway for them all to share.

But now Google is going its own way, in a first-of-its-kind project connecting the United States to Chile, home to the company’s largest data center in Latin America.

 Source: TeleGeography

“People think that data is in the cloud, but it’s not,” said Jayne Stowell, who oversees construction of Google’s undersea cable projects.
“It’s in the ocean.”

Getting it there is an exacting and time-intensive process.
A 456-foot ship named Durable will eventually deliver the cable to sea.
But first, the cable is assembled inside a sprawling factory a few hundred yards away, in Newington, N.H.
The factory, owned by the company SubCom, is filled with specialized machinery used to maintain tension in the wire and encase it in protective skin.

The cables begin as a cluster of strands of tiny threads of glass fibers.
Lasers propel data down the threads at nearly the speed of light, using fiber-optic technology.
After reaching land and connecting with an existing network, the data needed to read an email or open a web page makes its way onto a person’s device.

While most of us now largely experience the internet through Wi-Fi and phone data plans, those systems eventually link up with physical cables that swiftly carry the information across continents or across oceans.

In the manufacturing process, the cables move through high-speed mills the size of jet engines, wrapping the wire in a copper casing that carries electricity across the line to keep the data moving.
Depending on where the cable will be located, plastic, steel and tar are added later to help it withstand unpredictable ocean environments.
When finished, the cables will end up the size of a thick garden hose.

A year of planning goes into charting a cable route that avoids underwater hazards, but the cables still have to withstand heavy currents, rock slides, earthquakes and interference from fishing trawlers.
Each cable is expected to last up to 25 years.

A conveyor that staff members call “the Cable Highway” moves the cable directly into Durable, docked in the Piscataqua River.
The ship will carry over 4,000 miles of cable weighing about 3,500 metric tons when fully loaded.

Inside the ship, workers spool the cable into cavernous tanks.
One person walks the cable swiftly in a circle, as if laying out a massive garden hose, while others lie down to hold it in place to ensure it doesn’t snag or knot.
Even with teams working around the clock, it takes about four weeks before the ship is loaded up with enough cable to hit the open sea.

The first trans-Atlantic cable was completed in 1858 to connect the United States and Britain.
Queen Victoria commemorated the occasion with a message to President James Buchanan that took 16 hours to transmit.

While new wireless and satellite technologies have been invented in the decades since, cables remain the fastest, most efficient and least expensive way to send information across the ocean.
And it is still far from cheap: Google would not disclose the cost of its project to Chile, but experts say subsea projects cost up to $350 million, depending on the length of the cable.

In the modern era, telecommunications companies laid most of the cable, but over the past decade American tech giants started taking more control.
Google has backed at least 14 cables globally.
Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft have invested in others, connecting data centers in North America, South America, Asia, Europe and Africa, according to TeleGeography, a research firm.

Countries view the undersea cables as critical infrastructure and the projects have been flash points in geopolitical disputes.
Last year, Australia stepped in to block the Chinese technology giant Huawei from building a cable connecting Australia to the Solomon Islands, for fear it would give the Chinese government an entry point into its networks.

source : TeleGeography

Yann Durieux, a ship captain, said one of his most important responsibilities was keeping morale up among his crew during the weeks at sea.
Building the infrastructure of our digital world is a labor-intensive job.

With 53 bedrooms and 60 bathrooms, the Durable can hold up to 80 crew members.
The team splits into two 12-hour shifts.
Signs warn to be quiet in the hallways because somebody is always sleeping.

The ship will carry enough supplies to last at least 60 days: roughly 200 loaves of bread, 100 gallons of milk, 500 cartons of a dozen eggs, 800 pounds of beef, 1,200 pounds of chicken and 1,800 pounds of rice.
There’s also 300 rolls of paper towels, 500 rolls of toilet paper, 700 bars of soap and almost 600 pounds of laundry detergent.
No alcohol is allowed on board.

“I still get seasick,” said Walt Oswald, a technician who has been laying cables on ships for 20 years.
He sticks a small patch behind his ear to hold back the nausea.
“It’s not for everybody.”

Poor weather is inevitable.
Swells reach up to 20 feet, occasionally requiring the ship captain to order the subsea cable to be cut so the ship can seek safer waters.
When conditions improve, the ship returns, retrieving the cut cable that has been left attached to a floating buoy, then splicing it back together before continuing on.

Work on board is slow and plodding.
The ship, at sea for months at a time, moves about six miles per hour, as the cables are pulled from the giant basins out through openings at the back of the ship.
Closer to shore, where there’s more risk of damage, an underwater plow is used to bury the cable in the sea floor.



The Durable crew doesn’t expect the work to slow down anytime soon.

After the Latin America project, Google plans to build a new cable running from Virginia to France, set to be done by 2020.
The company has 13 data centers open around the world, with eight more under construction — all needed to power the trillions of Google searches made each year and the more than 400 hours of video uploaded to YouTube each minute.

“It really is management of a very complex multidimensional chess board,” said Ms. Stowell of Google, who wears an undersea cable as a necklace.

Demand for undersea cables will only grow as more businesses rely on cloud computing services.
And technology expected around the corner, like more powerful artificial intelligence and driverless cars, will all require fast data speeds as well.
Areas that didn’t have internet are now getting access, with the United Nations reporting that for the first time more than half the global population is now online.

source : ESRI
The International Cable Protection Committee has emphasize the need for accurate charting of submarine cables and to respect UNCLOS due regard principle between deep sea mining contractors and owners of submarine cables.
The map shows in general the large number of submarine cables around the world.
Lots of communication and the Internet goes through submarine cables, damaging one could have a great impact around the world.
The ICPC and the IHO MSDI WG will work together to develop a S-4XX product spec to be used for the maritime community.

“This is a huge part of the infrastructure that’s making that happen,” said Debbie Brask, the vice president at SubCom, who is managing the Google project.
“All of that data is going in the undersea cables.”

Links :

• The Economist : Tech giants are building their own undersea fibre-optic networks
• GeoGarage blog : Seafloor cables that carry the world's internet traffic ... / Russian submarines are prowling around vital undersea cables. It's ... / Today in technology: raising a ladder to the moon ... / The internet's worst-case scenario finally happened ... / Facebook and Microsoft are laying a giant cable ... / Here's how the Internet's arteries travel across the ... / Thin underwater cables hold the internet / Undersea cables are actually more vulnerable than ... / Submarine cable maps / Here's how the Internet's arteries travel across the ... / Submarine cable map 2016 / This map shows the explosive growth of underwater cables that power ... / Submarine cables : how the net connected the world /

Thomas Coville, professional solo sailor, heroes of the unpredictable

Thomas Coville, Professional Solo Sailor| Heroes of the Unpredictable from Helly Hansen

The Tangaroa Expedition (The Kon-Tiki Expedition) 2012 Documentary

All his life, Olav Heyerdahl had heard the stories of his grandfather: of how he crossed the Pacific in 1947 on a primitive raft made of balsa wood.

Now at last, he got to experience it first hand.

As a tribute to his grandfather and the original Kon-tiki expedition, Olav and his team built a new raft in Peru and sailed it all the way to Raiatea in French Polynesia.

When they arrived on the 24th of July 2006, after four months at sea, over a thousand people greeted them in a traditional Polynesian welcoming ceremony.

This is a spectacular and unique documentary of the modern day voyage, with footage of the 1947 expedition setting the context.

The 1947 Kon-tiki film won an Oscar, and Thor Heyerdahl's book has sold more the 50 millions copies worldwide.

At the time, the whole world was amazed by this eccentric Norwegian explorer.

The story continues to enthral 60 years later, only this time in colour.

Maiden review – raging seas and sexist squalls

For the International Women's Day 2019 a souvenir : voyage of a courageous pioneer... Maiden

Maiden made history in 1990 when its female crew, led by Tracy Edwards, became the first to sail the Whitbread Round the World Race. 

Photo : Dogwoof

From The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

Tracy Edwards is the British sailor who made history in 1989 by skippering the first all-female crew in the Whitbread Round the World yacht race.
This film tells her story and those of her crew members, as they faced sexist squalls from male competitors, who as greying interviewees don’t look best pleased even now to be talking about when and how Tracy beat them.
There was also the press.
The Guardian’s Bob Fisher comes in for some criticism.

Edwards showed a staggering amount of leadership and energy on dry land, as well as at sea, assembling her crew and persuading the King of Jordan to provide vital sponsorship.
The boat was coyly called Maiden, and Alex Holmes’s film also shows how it punningly bore the banner “Maiden Great Britain”.
Their success was also a matter of patriotic pride.

https://www.maiden.film 

The incredible, against-all-odds story of sailor Tracy Edwards, who skippered the first all-female international crew in the 1989 Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race.

Holmes recreates their adventure, using a lot of home movie footage of her childhood and early life – this appears to be the real thing, although sometimes I wondered if faux Super 8 reconstruction was being used – and also the TV coverage from 1989, with much toe-curling Partridgean commentary from Frank Bough and Fred Dinenage.
At one stage in the race, Edwards cunningly manipulated the paparazzi by getting the entire crew to wear glamorous swimming costumes on deck: they each look surreally like Princess Diana aboard Dodi Fayed’s yacht – but maybe that is simply the era.

Tracy Edwards experienced her “first real taste of sexism and misogyny” when she sailed around the world with an all-female crew from 1989 to 1990 — but almost 30 years later, “Maiden” director Alex Holmes doesn’t think much has changed.

There is something that the film doesn’t address as clearly it could have done.
In 1989, Edwards was asked if she was a feminist and she said no – and that she hated the word. It’s probably clear enough what she meant: she just wanted an equal shot at yachting success, just as the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher once wanted an equal shot at political success.
But, given that the present-day Edwards is interviewed at length, Holmes could perhaps have given her another chance to consider that question.
At all events, it pays due homage to Edwards as a courageous pioneer.

Links :

• CNN : Tracy Edwards: 'Maiden was either met with antipathy or aggression'
• DailyMail : Tracy Edwards' bid to save boat that carried her round the world on historic voyage after it is found rotting on an island in the Indian Ocean
• Vanity Fair : “Sailing Was About Freedom”: The Gripping True Story of the Maiden

Fun fact: GPS uses 10 bits to store the week. That means it runs out... oh heck – April 6, 2019

GPS Week-Number Roll-Over (WNRO) problem

From The Register by Shaun Nichols

Nav gadgets will be Gah, Properly Screwed if you don't or can't update firmware

Older satnavs and such devices won't be able to use America's Global Positioning System properly after April 6 unless they've been suitably updated or designed to handle a looming epoch rollover.

The worldwide precise time broadcasting performed by the GNSS constellations (GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, Beidou)  is the most strategic and vital asset for all our society infrastructures.

picture courtesy of Marco Lisi, ESA

GPS signals from satellites include a timestamp, needed in part to calculate one's location, that stores the week number using ten binary bits.
That means the week number can have 210 or 1,024 integer values, counting from zero to 1,023 in this case.
Every 1,024 weeks, or roughly every 20 years, the counter rolls over from 1,023 to zero.



The first Saturday in April will mark the end of the 1,024th week, after which the counter (WN = Week Number) will spill over from 1,023 to zero.
The last time the week number overflowed like this was in 1999, nearly two decades on from the first epoch in January 1980.

You can see where this is going.
If devices in use today are not designed or patched to handle this latest rollover, they will revert to an earlier year after that 1,024th week in April, causing attempts to calculate position to potentially fail.
System and navigation data could even be corrupted, we're warned.
"GPS devices with a poorly implemented GPS Time-to-UTC conversion algorithm may provide incorrect UTC following a week number rollover," US Homeland Security explained in its write-up (PDF) of the issue this week.
"Additionally, some GPS devices that calculate the week number value from a device-specific date rather than the start of the current GPS Time Epoch may provide incorrect UTC at some other device-specific date."

As the Reg reader who tipped us off to the shortcoming noted, this could be a significant headache for data centers that use GPS timing for synchronization.
"Decent vendors should have patches. But who has been thinking about this?" our tipster told us.
"This could be a low-key Y2K style bug all over again, but with companies doing less preparation."

Fortunately, devices on sale right now should be prepared for this rollover and handle it gracefully.
Uncle Sam's GPS nerve-center GPS.gov says (PDF) receivers that follow the ICD-200/IS-GPS-200 specification should be able to deal with the week number overflow.
This basically means newer receivers built after, say, 2010 should be fine, provided they follow the specs and notice the rollover.

The creation of the GPS which serves as a reference to the epoch is January 6, 1980
About 20 years later, on August 21, 1999, the first Week Number Rollover
About 20 years later, on April 6, 2019, the next Week Number Rollover

To put it another way, if your gadget goes haywire in April, it's probably because of this.
If it works as normal: brilliant, it's not affected.
Consider yourself forewarned.

GPS.gov also notes that the new CNAV and MNAV message formats will use a 13-bit week number to solve the epoch migraine right up until the planet becomes uninhabitable via climate change or we all blow ourselves up.

 Beware of the sudden profusion of sales of used GPS on ebay, which you will know with full knowledge of the facts that they will no longer work in a few days if that is not already the case.

source : Retro-GPS.info 

Information from Furuno
For impacted GPS, a simple cold start (after resetting the almanacs/ephemerides) may solve the problem as it can permanently crash the GPS.
Note from Furuno : The date specified above is the date in which week number rollover occurs in our products listed above, and the date is independent from the one announced by the US Department of Homeland Security, namely, the 6th of April 2019, which is the date when GPS week number rollover occurs in the GPS as a system per se.
The difference stems from different initial dates of counting week between GPS system and the GPS chipset used in our products.

For devices unprepared for the counter overflow, a firmware upgrade will be necessary to keep the things working properly.
GPS.gov recommends those unsure about their readiness for the turnover, particularly enterprises, should consult the manufacturer of their equipment to make sure they have the proper updates in place.

Links :

• The Next Web : GPS satellites have a little-known ‘Millennium Bug’ problem of their own
• Orolia : The GPS 2019 Week Rollover - What You Need to Know
• Spirent : The GPS Week Number Rollover problem
• XYHT : GPS Week Rollover – Don’t Panic, but...
• The Sync channel blog (2015) : Simulating GPS Week Rollover with the Tria GPS
• UNB : The GPS End-of-Week rollover 
• Redit : GPS Date Error as of GPS Week 1000
• DHS published guidelines
• GPS simulators, such as LabSat 3, can be set up to test for issues arising from the GPS Week Rollover event.
• AppStore : GPS Time Converter
• The Register : Brit boffins build 'quantum compass'... say goodbye to those old GPS gizmos, possibly