Mercutio said:
I heard that sometime last year one of the major transpacific cables connecting Oz to the US got cut, too... something that was designed to be replaced only every 50 years got broken after only four or six years in service. I'm not too keen on verifying this, since James is right here, but I can't imagine that losing any wire someone has taken the time to string from the US all the way down there is a good thing.
The state of international cables into Australia is interesting (err... well anyway, it is if that sort of thing interests you - skip the following if it doesn't).
For a long long time in Internet time, say about 8 years in real time, the only optical cables in and out of Australia were PacRimEast (to NZ, then via Hawaii to the US), and PacRimWest (up past PNG to Guam). Then Optus and Telstra built JASAURUS, a small cable from Port Hedland on the WA northern coast up to Indonesia, where it can link in to APCN, the main Asia cable (Indonesia to Japan, via Singapore, HK, South Korea etc.). Then about three or so years ago SMW3 put in a 2.5Gb/s section from Jakarta to Perth (SMW3 runs from Europe to Japan via Asia, a competitor to FLAG).
For a long while the fastest rate of technological improvement was in microprocessors. Then for a while it was hard disks, but for the last five years it has been in optical transmission such as is used in undersea (and overland) cables. Cables like PacRimEast came from the very first generation of optical cable, with a maximum transmision rate of 2x560Mb/s - which was fine for voice calls but nowhere near enough for the boom in IP data. JASAURUS is four years newer and maxed out at 5Gb/s.
The trouble with laying cable, particularly in south east Asia, is that it is prone to damage from trawlers and ship anchors. The South China Sea and the Straits of Malacca are very shallow and have enormous amounts of shipping go through them, so cables are constantly being broken. The incident to which you allude, Mercutio, was when a ship sectioned SMW3 between Singapore and Indonesia. Since SMW3 doesn't have a diverse path and both JASAURUS and PacRimWest are full, there was nowhere for the data to go. Telstra was one of the main users of that section of cable for its international IP traffic (to the US) and had to reroute everything over PacRimEast, which simply didn't have much capacity to spare. This was the situation for three days until the cable was repaired.
About 14 months ago Southern Cross went in between the US and Australia. At the time it was put in service it was the fastest cable in the world at 120Gb/s, able to be upgraded to 480Gb/s, and with two completely seperate cables for diversity in case one should break. SX improved the RTD (round trip delay) from Australia to the US from 350ms (via SMW3/China-US) or 380ms (via PacRimEast) to about 140ms - a dramtic improvement. SX is 50% owned by Telecom NZ, 40% by Singtel/Optus, and 10% by Worldcom. Telstra isn't an owner and therefore must pay wholesale rates for capacity, which is obviously more expensive than if they owned the cable. Telstra is also somewhat hamstrung since it formed Reach with HKT, most of whose cables run from Hong Kong - the task then becomes how to get the data to Hong Kong and thence to the US, with PacRimWest, JASAURUS and SMW3 all full.
Since then Telstra has put in the AJC cable which goes from Australia to Japan via Guam at 640Gb/s, and presumably will allow it to lower its costs further by abandoning some SX capacity in favour of AJC (they have a nifty website at
www.ajcable.com). AJC went into service in December.
Singtel and Optus have announced that they will build a new cable from Perth to Singapore, but it hasn't been started yet and that is probably 12 months or so away from going into operation.
Cable & Wireless has almost completed what will for a short while be the fastest cable in the world - Apollo - from the US to the UK and Europe, with a speed of 1.2Tb/s. It'll be eclipsed in May by i2i, a 8.4Tb/s cable from Singapore to India.
