Photos: Telstra's undersea fibre optic cable
Summary: Installing cables can be difficult — especially if they're 9,000 kilometres long and up several kilometres underwater. Our photo gallery gives you a look inside the 'Ile de Sein', a ship used to lay Telstra's latest fibre optic cable, which will become part of Australia's global Internet network backbone.
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This is the Ile de Sein — and as you can see — it's a massive ship. It sports a crew of 60, who work in shifts to lay cable twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.
The cable that runs between Australian and Hawaii isn't straight; it needs to run around under-sea mountains, past crevasses and follows the rugged terrain of the sea floor. Many months of planning were involved in plotting the best undersea route for the cable. A member of the project commented the undersea cables can reach depths of 5,000 metres or more.
Telstra expects the cable to be active by the fourth quarter this year. Bandwidth on the cable will be available to both Telstra retail and wholesale customers.
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Talkback
I love image 10!!
That's all kinds of funny!!
Trenching machine
Down the bottom near the person's head is where the leading edge of the trencher is.
The skids are just to the left of that.
It gets dropped off the back of the ship and cable is fed into the trench as it is made.
They use this when close to shore because of the possibility of trawlers damaging the cable.
It will feed cable out at roughly 500m/hour as compared to 10km/h when out at sea.
Alternative website.
Cable Shielding
Cable laying coved by wired.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html
It's over 10 years old but still great (if very long). I'd recommend printing it out, print version is here:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html
Ile de Seine