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A comment on Protecting Undersea Internet Cables Is a Tech Nightmare. Parent comment

Re:Protecting Undersea Internet Cables Is a Tech Nightmare by anttihaapala on Saturday December 07, 2024 @12:53PM (#42351410)
If you consider an underwater cable running from Finland to Germany or Sweden to Lithuania in the Baltic Sea, it is virtually impossible for a ship travelling from St. Petersburg to the Kattegat to avoid passing over it, so redundancy can do only that much there.
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Re:Protecting Undersea Internet Cables Is a Tech Nightmare by diggan on Saturday December 07, 2024 @02:11PM (#42352032)
> If you consider an underwater cable running from Finland to Germany or Sweden

Well, if you only think about direct links, then yes. But run 5 cables up and down the coasts of Sweden<>Finland, then also for Sweden<>Germany, Denmark<>Sweden and Denmark<>Germany and you start having a lot of redundancy.

Of course, that also adds a lot of ongoing costs for infrastructure, monitoring and maintenance, so not a silver bullet exactly.

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Re:Protecting Undersea Internet Cables Is a Tech Nightmare by logicchains on Saturday December 07, 2024 @01:11PM (#42351557)
Maybe a stupid question, but is it possible to run a power cable next to the internet cables, so any ship dragging its anchor over the cables gets a rude surprise? Or that wouldn't work underwater?
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Re:Protecting Undersea Internet Cables Is a Tech Nightmare by Etheryte on Saturday December 07, 2024 @01:24PM (#42351661)
That wouldn't do anything, you'd just be sending it straight to ground.
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Re:Protecting Undersea Internet Cables Is a Tech Nightmare by immibis on Saturday December 07, 2024 @06:29PM (#42353687)
"straight to ground" is not how electricity works, but yes, they'd probably just destroy the cable in that spot, and the anchor would have only a slight scar on it at most
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Re:Protecting Undersea Internet Cables Is a Tech Nightmare by kortilla on Saturday December 07, 2024 @06:37PM (#42353731)
Undersea cables already have electric cables to power the embedded repeaters
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Re:Protecting Undersea Internet Cables Is a Tech Nightmare by tzs on Saturday December 07, 2024 @11:08PM (#42354958)
A big problem with that in general is that there is an accidental cable cut from a ship about every 3 days on average. Deliberate cable cuts are rare.
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