On 3/17/22 18:42, Michael Thomas wrote:
I was reading an article in the Economist about a new fiber route down
the Red Sea from Israel and wondered if there were any branches off of
those lines and where the routers were for them. The route kind of
made it look like it was completely at sea, but it would kind of make
sense to leave them at sea if you could put a router there.
There's a limited number of possible branches on a cable and as a result
you just put the routers on the edges rather than in the middle. What
you do put in the water is something like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_branching_unit
The more the active electronics are at the ends rather than in the open
ocean the greater the serviceability is and also over the lifetime of
the cable the easier it is to upgrade it to higher capacity as the data
bearing capacity of a given wavelength increases. The FLAG cable has had
for example has has several capacity increases over it's service life
which closing in on 25 years at this point.
Amplifiers are still necessary for longer spans but a lot of other logic
is not. for situations where the distances are manageable passive
unrepeated systems are greatly prefered because it keeps servicing due
to electronic faults to a minimum and reduces the cost accordingly. see
the recent tonga cable fault and repair for a passive system.
The mean depth of the worlds oceans is around ~3700 meters below MSL
which means most service calls involve deploying to the proximate
location of the fault, fishing around for a while and then carefully
re-laying several kilometers of cable on a splice has been made. which
typically takes weeks.
Mike