$1.5 billion: The cost of cutting London-Tokyo latency by 60ms

Fri Mar 23 17:33:34 UTC 2012

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 10:21 AM,  <Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu> wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:56:46 -0000, Brandon Butterworth said:
>> > I'd be quite interested in seeing the MTTR for a sub-ice cable break which
>> > happened in late october.
>>
>> More fun too when we get global warming under control and there's no
>> longer any way to reach it
>
> Submarines.  It's allegedly been done before, and will probably be done again.

No allegedly about it, though it's not officially acknowledged.  See
Sontag's "Blind Man's Bluff".

However, that was in shallow water, where the sub could rest on the
seabottom next to the cable and divers could exit and work on the
cable outside the sub to tap it.  The subs involved can't dive to the
depths that the cables in question will be mostly laid at, and those
exceed reasonable diver operations depths as well.

One could fix this situation, but it would probably have to be a (low
end) nuclear power plant and a very custom deep submergence hull, and
probably on the order of as expensive as the combined cables cost to
lay.  Probably easier to run redundant cables and fix it come the next
spring...

-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com