adelaidemedblog

Did you ever wonder how people lay cable intercontinentally undersea, to provide for all those telecommunications that we have (not everyone has satellite, yet)? I have actually wondered for a while, thank you very much. Those cables that were supposedly damaged in those Taiwan earthquakes; that’s a good start.

Well, I had no idea. Today, I figured out something new, thankfully. You’d never think while swimming at the beach that there were thousands of miles of fibreoptics running beneath you, if not directly, then having checked on a map, not too far away. If we imagine the number of companies that require these cable things, it really is a great big world out there. I don’t know… I totally get this weird feeling when I think about undersea cables. Just like there’s something bigger going on. It’s a really small feeling. I’m just so tiny, compared to these giant undersea cables. I imagine, though, they’re not that giant at all… they’re just fibreoptics. Apparently ships went out - in fact, have been going out, since 1858 or so - laying down these cables. And obviously, people still do it. I mean, just because we have the feeling we can call any country we would like to in the world these days doesn’t mean that we actually can. Well, I haven’t actually tried so maybe you can. But I find it hard to believe that humans have actually laid down fibreoptics to the extent that there is a line connecting each and every land mass up. Then again, I used to take that for granted.

I didn’t really think about it when I couldn’t call Macau. So let’s say I want to call G, and I make the call. 00118534xxxxx. International dialing number… 0011… Macau… 853… and then… the house number. Where are these numbers taking me? It made perfect sense… and now it’s like, it’s at a whole new level. So if I press 0011, that takes the electrical signal to the international junction, then when I press 853, a certain gate opens that allows the signal to pass through to Macau? I guess most of traffic to Asia, since it would be a frequently dialed location in Australia, would take place through fewer, or a simpler, rather than a more complex route. Then again, they wouldn’t have planned that back in 1858 would they? I mean the international student influx only began what… 8 years ago? Or a bit more? Hell, did they even have international telecommunication in Australia in 1858? Why isn’t it, like, a national holiday, the day it “was made”? I mean, it must have been the efforts of hundreds of men (and possibly women, though perhaps not) on ships, living and dying by the trade.

I suppose no other countries have this national holiday so why should we…

The factual basis of all this is from Yahoo answers, by the way. And a bit of Digg.com. But undersea cable repairers seems like a totally sci-fi job. I mean, if the cable is shallow enough, they get a remote controlled robot down there and whip it back into shape (read: replace damaged section), and if the cable is too deep, they get this funky buoy weighted cable-hook device to bring it up to the surface. But get this - how do they figure out which friggin section of a transcontinental fibreoptic cable is damaged? I mean, a frigging piranha (sorry I know that piranha aren’t supposed to live in the ocean) could have mistaken a poor, lonely little cable sitting and crying at the bottom of the ocean floor for its next meal and taken a big chomp out of it - *swoosh* - and there goes all affordable forms of telephony/telecommunication to the U.S.A., look I can see it, going, going, gone. It’s like Escape From L.A., where Kurt Russell uses his satellite phone to disrupt the world’s telecommunications devices - for good - and the world goes back into the Dark Ages during a Presidents’ address. I can imagine it now - all the lights go out, and The Simpsons goes back to hand-drawn. Except that it’s only Australia to the U.S.A, and no one cares about The Simpsons anymore - and, people will go out to repair it.  So here come the big guns, quote:

“Cable engineers can figure out the general neighborhood of the problem based on the reported phone or Internet service outages. From terminal stations on shore, they can zero in on more specific coordinates by sending light pulses along the fibers (sic) in the cable. A working fiber (sic) will transmit those pulses all the way across the ocean, but a broken one will bounce it back from the site of the damage. By measuring the time it takes for the reflections to come back, the engineers can figure out where along the cable they have a problem.”

http://www.slate.com/id/2156987
Accessed on YOUR MOAR GAY

I was thinking, though, that what if it was like what A said. Like… there’s this little person (ok, he’d have to be a pretty little person to sit inside a fibreoptic glass cable) sitting inside the junctions of the fibreoptic glass cable, waiting for the 0011… and he reaches for the switch………
………..no okay let’s just forget that now.