From: Dan Clemmensen (Dan@Clemmensen.ShireNet.com)
Date: Thu Nov 12 1998 - 06:12:38 MST
Steve Clancy wrote:
>
> Methinks I have a crazy plan!
> How about this; an underground tunnel, approx 1m across, which
> would run from Melbourne, in Oz, under the seabed to California, housing
> optical fibre cables.
> The distance is about 12000km give or take.
> I guesstimated that tunnelling and optical fibre costs would be
> around US$2000 per metre. So that figures to be US$24G.
> I would be interested in any comments on the validity or costings
> of such a scheme.
> (I reckon' it could be part of a global neural net of super fast data links.)
>
> Thanks, Steve.
The technology for undersea cables is well developed and does not require
tunnels. The current big cable-laying effort is called "Oxygen". They are
laying huge amounts of fiber. The economics are such that it is now
cheaper to use undersea fiber than on-land fiber in many places even when
the land route is cheaper. Furthermore, over the last few years, there have
been enormous increases in the bandwidth that a fiber can be made to support.
The new fiber is passive: no repeaters on the sea floor, so the new technology
can be applied to existing fiber by upgrading the on-land endpoints. current-
generation UDWM gear gets more than 40Gbps per fiber. A cable has many fibers.
I saw a recent report on a new scheme that can increase this by a factor of
100, which boggles the mind.
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