BBC reports Kenya fiber break

Thu Mar 1 17:59:45 UTC 2012

On Feb 29, 2012, at 11:17 17AM, Marshall Eubanks wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 10:08 AM, Justin M. Streiner
> <streiner at cluebyfour.org> wrote:
>> On Wed, 29 Feb 2012, Rodrick Brown wrote:
>> 
>>> There's about 1/2 a dozen or so known private and government research
>>> facilities on Antarctica and I'm surprised to see no fiber end points on
>>> that continent? This can't be true.
>> 
>> 
>> Constantly shifting ice shelves and glaciers make a terrestrial cable
>> landing very difficult to implement on Antarctica.  Satellite connectivity
>> is likely the only feasible option.  There are very few places in
>> Antarctica that are reliably ice-free enough of the time to make a viable
>> terrestrial landing station.  Getting connectivity from the landing station
>> to other places on the continent is another matter altogether.
> 
> Apparently at least one long fiber pull has been contemplated.
> 
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/2207259.stm
> 
> (Note : the headline is incorrect - the Internet reached the South Pole in 1994,
> via satellite, of course :
> http://www.southpolestation.com/trivia/90s/ftp1.html )
> 
> As far as I can tell, this was never done, and the South Pole gets its
> Internet mostly via
> TDRSS.
> 
> http://www.usap.gov/technology/contentHandler.cfm?id=1971

Yes.  I had discussions with some of their network support folks circa 1994 -- with
limited bandwidth (DS0, as I recall) and only a few hours of connectivity per day,
when a satellite was over the horizon, they were very concerned about attackers
clogging their link.

		--Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb