Russian diplomats lingering near fiber optic cables

Fri Jun 2 18:55:55 UTC 2017

The plan is to decommission TAT-14 in 2024. That is long before the next Biblical Flood due the ice caps melting. The Trans-Atlantic systems have a life span at best of 30 years. When the next set of systems is built rising waters will be taken into account.

________________________________
From: Valdis Kletnieks <valdis at vt.edu> on behalf of valdis.kletnieks at vt.edu <valdis.kletnieks at vt.edu>
Sent: Friday, June 2, 2017 8:40 PM
To: Christopher Morrow
Cc: Rod Beck; nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: Russian diplomats lingering near fiber optic cables

On Fri, 02 Jun 2017 13:23:26 -0400, Christopher Morrow said:
> is this a case of 'wherer the cable gets dry' vs 'where the electronics
> doing cable things lives' ?
> aren't (normally) the dry equipment locations a bit inland and then have
> last-mile services from the consortium members headed inland to their
> respective network pops?

Well, I'd be willing to buy that logic, except the specific buildings called
out look pretty damned big for just drying off a cable.  For example, this
is claimed to be the US landing point for TAT-14 - looks around 4K square feet?

http://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/tuckerton-cable-landing-station/view/google/
[http://khm0.googleapis.com/kh?v=726&hl=en-US&x=307790&y=398428&z=20]<http://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/tuckerton-cable-landing-station/view/google/>

Tuckerton Cable Landing Station in Tuckerton, NJ (Google ...<http://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/tuckerton-cable-landing-station/view/google/>
virtualglobetrotting.com
Tuckerton Cable Landing Station (Google Maps). Tuckerton Cable Landing Station hosts the TAT-14 fibre cable which runs 15,000km to...

Though I admit I'm foggy on how much gear is needed to stuff however many amps
at 4,000 volts down the cable core to power the repeaters.  But again - if
there's gear stuffing that many amps at that many volts down a cable, salt
water could be the start of a bad day...

(And note - I'm not saying that *everybody* who built a cable landing station
managed to get it wrong.  I'm saying that with the number of landing stations
in existence, the chance that *somebody* got it wrong is probably scarily high.
Telco and internet experiences in New Orleans during Katrina and NYC during
Sandy suggest there's a lot of infrastructure built with "we never had storm
surge in this building before so it can't happen" planning....)