The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat

https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea-deep-repair-ships

by vinnyglennon • 2 years ago

287 91 2 years ago

theverge.com

TrailMixRaisin• 2 years ago

I think I would love the article but the presentation makes it necessary hard to enjoy.

cfn• 2 years ago

Yes, you run the risk of sea sickness with all the unexpected screen scrolling direction changes.

Still a good and interesting article.

jc_811• 2 years ago

I actually loved the presentation of it, kudos to whichever team collaborated on it!

arthens• 2 years ago

You probably used a well supported device.

I read the article over 3 devices and scrolling can get pretty buggy.

balou23• 2 years ago

Yes, absolutely impossible to read

kwhitefoot2• 2 years ago

I just used Reader mode, didn't even need JavaScript.

Do read it. It's a well written and also very affecting insight into the lives of people doing essential work under difficult conditions.

khuey3• 2 years ago

For those who have never seen it, Neal Stephenson's "Mother Earth Mother Board" for Wired in 1996 is the must-read classic of this genre. Wired seems to have paywalled it recently but it's available on archive.org

https://web.archive.org/web/20151107094324/https://www.wired...

gabcoh• 2 years ago

And if you’re craving even more telecoms history after that (as I was when I read it a few years ago) Arthur C Clarke’s “How the World Was One” goes into the history of undersea cables and other telecoms technologies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_World_Was_One

davidw• 2 years ago

That immediately came to mind when I saw this article.

Ajay-p• 2 years ago

The article is fascinating but the website is a disaster.

This makes it marginally easier to read: https://archive.is/IpfNq

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

Isn't the title of this "The Cloud Under The Sea"?

Or at least it was on the other submissions days ago

RicoElectrico• 2 years ago

Some news outlets A/B test their headlines.

dfc• 2 years ago

ABC.au had a similarly named show on the topic back in December. I have to imagine they are related:

https://iview.abc.net.au/show/cloud-under-the-sea/video/NS23...

underseacables• 2 years ago

If you find this interesting, I highly recommend the book "Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage".

The book discusses "Operation Ivy Bells" whose mission was to tap the underwater Soviet communication lines during the Cold War. The submarine installed a recording pod onto Soviet cables and recorded everything.

How did they find the cables?

A technician told a story about growing up on the Mississippi river, and how you could often find a sign on the bank, telling you that there were underwater cables. He hypothesized that the same thing might exist in the Soviet union.

Sure enough, the submarine secretly crept into Soviet water, popped the periscope, and found a sign in Russian on the bank, saying be careful, underwater cables.

It's rumored that when the Soviets learned of this, they went down and found the pods. During disassembly, they found a stamped plate deep inside which read "Made in the USA."

SAS24• 2 years ago

Telegeography (cited in the article) publishes an interactive submarine cable map: https://www.submarinecablemap.com

You can even buy printed versions: https://shop.telegeography.com/collections/telecom-maps/

manmal• 2 years ago

Interestingly, I can’t see a single line from the US to Russia or China (not sure about the latter).

khuey3• 2 years ago

Not much reason to have direct cables. The parts of Russia and the US that are close to each other are very empty, and it makes sense to land transpacific cables in Japan or Taiwan and pick up traffic there rather than going non-stop to China.

el_benhameen• 2 years ago

The submarine cable map has long been on my want-to-splurge-but-can’t-justify list. Would make great office art.

riffic• 2 years ago

afloat, more like sunken

ctenb• 2 years ago

I stopped after the first 3 slides, since the information density is too low and the animation too slow.

JumpCrisscross9• 2 years ago

the information density is too low

You failed the marshmallow test [1]. There is a traditional, long-form article that presents a rewarding read.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experim...

generalizations3• 2 years ago

Marshmallow test assumes the payoff exists and is worth it. Does it? Is it? IDK and I don't want to waste time finding out. I'm far more interested in information-dense sources that let me find out if I want to know what it's offering. That's why journal articles have abstracts.

flybrand• 2 years ago

The kid can see the marshmallow. I can’t see the payoff from this article.

The kid knows what the payoff is.

The payoff here is unknown.

Kalium• 2 years ago

The article fails the marshmallow test - it needs to convince people that there is a traditional, long-form article that will be a rewarding read from the start.

Only then is the test relevant to humans. Otherwise, all that's really being tested is the reader's trust in the publisher.

ajdude• 2 years ago

I really hate how articles are starting with full page slides and animations now. This is the third article that I've seen this week following the format. I suppose since two of those three were on the HN front page it's a format that works, but I guess I'm not the target audience.

jasode2• 2 years ago

You failed the marshmallow test [1]. There is a traditional, long-form article that presents a rewarding read.

I didn't downvote but reading an unknown article with unknown or non-existent payoff is not the same premise as The Marshmallow Test because the Stanford experiment explicitly specifies the "reward" upfront: ">, a child was offered a choice between one small but immediate reward, or two small rewards if they waited for a period of time."

In contrast, reading unfamiliar articles to _maybe_ get a "reward" is a Bayesian Probability. As the one reads each sentence that's not engaging, the expectation that there might be a "reward" at the end is tainted by the fact that most long articles in the past that reader forced themselves to finish didn't present a worthwhile reward at the end.

Now, if JumpCrisscross explicitly told the reader that there would be a guaranteed mind-blowing insight payoff at the end of the long article before the reader started it, then the test of that patience would be closer to The Marshmallow test.

rjmill• 2 years ago

This article is ADHD-walled. The long load time, the weird slide show. Then the first page has a jittery animation that makes it impossible for me to actually focus on reading the article.

It's less of a marshmallow thing (though I often fail that test) and more of an overwhelming impression that the article does not want me to read it.

thefz2• 2 years ago

Rather the article failed him.

I closed the page at "from banks to government to TikTok", of all the glorious applications of a world wide network, the most glaring is teenagers making dance videos.

IncreasePosts• 2 years ago

That's not failing the marshmallow test, because the reward is obvious at the start of the test.

Is the reward obvious for reading any random article? No, but it may be there. But I sincerely doubt that you, or anyone, devotes themselves to consuming 100% of the content they come across on the internet, in hopes for a payoff(which may never come) in the end.

98codes• 2 years ago

This article definitely wins my award for the most unnecessary scrolljacking -- the animations add no value, are too short, and only serve to delay being to read further in the article.

JumpCrisscross9• 2 years ago

“The first submarine cable, strung across the English Channel in 1850, survived for a single day before — in what may be apocryphal cable industry slander — a French eel fisherman accidentally hooked it, sliced off a piece, and came ashore bragging about his discovery of a new type of metal seaweed.”

acomjean• 2 years ago

It’s amazing it worked. Especially “electrical” non fiber optic cables.

There is a museum on cape cod which was the end point of some early electrical cables (1891). It’s kind of interesting.

https://www.frenchcablestationmuseum.org/

Of course eclipsed by the wireless Marconi station..

voidUpdate• 2 years ago

I'm sorry, but I hate the recent web trend of scrolling not making you scroll, and it instead advances some flashy animation

Octokiddie• 2 years ago

For those complaining about the presentation, Safari's "Show Reader View" works well. Also supported on Firefox. On Chrome, it's complicated.

PaulDavisThe1st4• 2 years ago

However, you will miss a couple of rather cool transitions from line-drawn images to moving photographic images. It is reminscent of rotoscoping, but not the same. I sense a new art form, similar to when those GIFs with only a single moving object appeared some years ago.

htrp• 2 years ago

TLDR: They're telling the story of the boat crews that lay and repair all of the submarine fiber optic cable and puts a human face behind it all.

It's actually a very good read.

eggy5• 2 years ago

I guess I am biased to like the article including it's presentation, since I spent 6 years as a technical diver fixing underwater hydraulics and electrical systems, but at much shallower depths than the undersea cables. A buddy of mine is an ROV operator for pipe-laying ships. Cool stuff, big stuff, and lots of crazy stuff involved (seeing weird, unidentifiable living creatures quickly and blurrily cross in front of the ROV's camera, etc.).

I remained hidden below water as a technical show diver, while 1800 to 2000 audience members topside were getting impatient with a "technical delay" show pause. Typically, we were checking for faults in safety systems on underwater lifts, or for a potential hydraulics leak. We'd exit under the audience seating and go back to work after clearing the issue.

In a world filled with high-tech desk jobs, finance, and non-tangible products, and having grown up working class, I have great respect for all the people behind the scenes physically keeping our tenuous world together. Some of this became readily apparent with once invisible food delivery and restaurant workers during COVID. Healthcare workers obviously came into their own too, but so many other workers were still taken for granted.

I visualize a person huffing when their internet is slow or intermittent with a guy out to sea working during a storm or under difficult conditions and I laugh at the juxtaposition and perspective of both. I also do rope work and had to resort to doing more of it during COVID because my 'desk work' dried up a bit. Hanging 300ft off of a building with a black balaclava and mask with all-black rigging equipment in NJ doing a facade inspection across from the FBI building was certainly a memorable one. (Note: all-black equipment is standard for theater and entertainment work to stay hidden. I did confirm the FBI building people were informed there would be 4 guys on ropes that day. You never know!). I have been programming since 1978, but I have always had to have some physicality to my work in order to be satisfied. I guess it's having a more tangible connection to the world not abstracted away several layers.

pimlottc• 2 years ago

What sort of shows were these that you worked on as a technical diver? Is this a Seaworld-type of situation? But not sure why they would need underwater lifts.

eiginn• 2 years ago

O by Cirque du Soleil has underwater lifts not sure about other shows

eggy5• 2 years ago

The House of Dancing Water in Macau. There is O at Bellagio, LV, NV, Le Reve closed at Wynn Las Vegas, The House of Dancing Water, Macau (where I worked), and there's another one in Wuhan, China (yes, Wuhan). The lifts had 8m hydraulic actuators to allow them to go down 7m and rise above pool level +1m. There were 11 stage lifts. The high-dive act was from 24m up. 17m liters of water.

Here's a video during construction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35WJDSoA8Ag&t=13s

And you can check YouTube out for more of the motorcycle act, Russian Swings, high-dive, and other acts.

HeyLaughingBoy• 2 years ago

I have always had to have some physicality to my work in order to be satisfied

This also describes me pretty well. I was trained as a merchant ship's deck officer but opted to not go to sea as a career. Instead, I've spent my career building embedded systems. Every so often, I build a desktop app or a web application, but it lacks the satisfaction of being able to touch the hardware and actually watch my code affect something in the physical world.

nojvek• 2 years ago

affect something in the physical world.

This is satisfying. Especially anything electromechanical.

In a similar tangent, I believe social media isn't really social since you don't have people face to face talking to each other. The physical touch and facial expressions are quite important.

eggy5• 2 years ago

I am currently working on a control system from low-level, bare metal to high-level HMI/GUI for a cool, new hoist primarily for shows, but with applications in other industries. Shooting for high-integrity, safety-critical certifications above and beyond similar machines. I have been doing electromechanical stuff since the late 80s/early 90s. Hydraulic, pneumatic, electro-mechanical, air muscles, etc. I did animatronics (Christmas windows back in the day in NYC). Before Arduino, I went from purely relay logic circuits to the Parallax Basic Stamp in the 90s to Pic chips, to other 8-16-32-bit chips. I am, we are, looking for an Ada/SPARK2014 software engineer/developer for this control system. Any HN'ers with SPARK2014 experience? I've reached out to AdaCore too. I have been a CNC and manual machinist (built my own CNC router table machine in 2002), welder, technical diver, industrial rope access tech (SPRAT certified). I am currently enamored with Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) as something more than mechatronics. I have been riding motorcycles since the 80s, but now the highly integrated software on motos is next level. My current bike (2021 KTM Duke 890R) has power throughout the gears/rpms and amazing ride modes with supermoto ABS settings, and I am looking at the new Ducati 698 Hypermotard. The Ducati's software uses inputs and inertial motion sensors are integrated to allow beginner/intermediate riders to more confidently wheelie or do supermoto slide outs of the rear tire. Human-Machine Interface taking on a whole new meaning without the cyborg trope.

wglb• 2 years ago

Great story. Worthy of a blog post or several.

eggy5• 2 years ago

Thanks, not really a blogger. I should really, since I have tried to pass down my experience or mentor, but unfortunately, a lot of people younger than myself, were intrigued but went on to chase safer and more lucrative salaried work. In Macau for instance, the government subsidizes the citizen residents with an annual stipend, free transportation, and medical care. One of my trainees after a couple of years left to take a government office job with benefits, and collect his $1k+ USD annual stipend. He remarked how much he learned, and how exciting it was to overcome his fear of being underwater, and how the new job would not really challenge him. But he still left it all behind. My older son picked up some of my eclectic background but has recently taken a tech job in software engineering. I am developing a protable, power dense, novel wirerope hoist with an old friend, and I am hoping it takes off and I can drag him into the business. There he can exercise many skills and still program. We are going with Ada/SPARK2014 for the high-integrity, safety-critical aspects. Rust hasn't standardized yet and doesn't have the verification tools yet, but it's heading that way. Maybe in 5 to 10 more years it will have a legacy in this field to compete.

alistairjudson• 2 years ago

My Dad was an ROV technician for a brief period in the early 2000s, he got made redundant in early 2002 just after 9/11, and the dot com bubble bursting.

On his last of the only two trips he made, he was based in Recife in northern Brazil. The ship was just there, on call, ready to respond to any breakages.

My Mum, sister, and I were lucky enough to be flown out to Brazil for Christmas 2001, and it's something I'll never forget. I got to fuse bits of fibre-optic cable together under a microscope, drive an ROV about in the harbour a bit, and stand in some massive cable drums (all incredibly exciting for an eight year old child). It was the first time I went abroad, and the first time my Mum flew on a plane.

It's amazing how much damage the dot com bubble bursting did to the industry, and the people who worked in it (I don't think my Dad ever really recovered from it). I believe until very recently there was so much fibre laid during the dot com boom, that we didn't really need to lay much more.

ed_blackburn• 2 years ago

Hi, ex Nortel Networks employee here.

zikduruqe• 2 years ago

I used to run them DMS switches. (Divorce Made Simple, or Days Midnights and Sundays)

khuey3• 2 years ago

I believe until very recently there was so much fibre laid during the dot com boom, that we didn't really need to lay much more.

My understanding is that there was a one-two punch of the dot com boom laying a huge amount of fiber followed by wave division multiplexing shortly afterwards massively increasing the capacity of existing fiber that resulted in an oversupply that lasted a decade or more.

NortySpock• 2 years ago

Wave Division Multiplexing being substantially enabled by all-optical amplifiers in the late 1990's it seems, because otherwise you have to convert optical to electrical signal, amplifiy that, and reconvert that back into an optical signal in order to travel down the next length of fiber-optic.

With optical amplifiers you can amplifiy every color of the rainbow at once, without breaking the chain.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_amplifier

croisillon• 2 years ago

hi, i spent christmas 2001 in brazil too :)

badbart14• 2 years ago

Great read about a often overlooked part of global infrastructure. I personally liked the presentation style but get its not for everyone. Highly recommend the latest episode of the Vergecast where they talk more about the undersea cable world: https://youtu.be/bJnt87JgKMU

ryanmarsh• 2 years ago

Nothing will compare to standing in a book store as a teen reading Mother Earth Mother Board, published in wired, while my Coke got warm.

https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

rob74• 2 years ago

Right from the start, the tone of the presentation struck a wrong kind of chord with me. "The world's most important infrastructure"? Dear author, try living without electricity or fresh water for a few days, then I'll ask you again...

TimTheTinker• 2 years ago

It's an interesting, well-written article written in good faith.

I think small semantic issues like this should be ignored so we can enjoy worthwhile discussion.

PaulDavisThe1st4• 2 years ago

I thought the same, but then, after a few pages, was this:

If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function. The financial system would immediately freeze. Currency trading would stop; stock exchanges would close. Banks and governments would be unable to move funds between countries because the Swift and US interbank systems both rely on submarine cables to settle over $10 trillion in transactions each day. In large swaths of the world, people would discover their credit cards no longer worked and ATMs would dispense no cash. As US Federal Reserve staff director Steve Malphrus said at a 2009 cable security conference, “When communications networks go down, the financial services sector does not grind to a halt. It snaps to a halt.”
Corporations would lose the ability to coordinate overseas manufacturing and logistics. Seemingly local institutions would be paralyzed as outsourced accounting, personnel, and customer service departments went dark. Governments, which rely on the same cables as everyone else for the vast majority of their communications, would be largely cut off from their overseas outposts and each other. Satellites would not be able to pick up even half a percent of the traffic. Contemplating the prospect of a mass cable cut to the UK, then-MP Rishi Sunak concluded, “Short of nuclear or biological warfare, it is difficult to think of a threat that could be more justifiably described as existential.”

You could still argue with "the world's most important" claim, but this makes it clear that it is at least somewhat defensible.

AnimalMuppet2• 2 years ago

But that's rather overstating the case, isn't it? If all these cables simultaneously break, we'd switch to Starlink (at much lower total bandwidth), and international communication would drop in volume, with the most valuable uses winning.

Millisecond-level currency trading would cease, but second- or minute-level trading would continue, and that would not dramatically destroy economies.

ATMs of foreign banks might stop working; local banks should continue.

Watching video from a foreign server would no longer be possible, but that's not the end of the world.

And so on. It would slow many things down, some things would stop, but it wouldn't be the end of modern civilization.

billfor• 2 years ago

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40071540

FireBeyond• 2 years ago

Simple, but perhaps silly, question. If a fiber optic cable breaks underwater, the crew brings it up to the boat. But what if there is water contamination? Like if a fiber strand is broken or exposed, what's to prevent water particles entering the fiber?

PaulDavisThe1st4• 2 years ago

If you read the article, and didn't think to get a little more information the SS Great Eastern, mentioned early on as the first cable repair vessel, here you go:

https://historicaldigression.com/2011/03/28/the-great-easter...

renewiltord• 2 years ago

Not that quickly fixed. EAC has been out for months. But it is a cool industry.

m463• 2 years ago

Something about the look of that orange lifeboat makes me think back to my childhood, watching my share of japanese cartoons.

nektro• 2 years ago

excellent article

hn_throwaway_99• 2 years ago

The opening section, which felt like it was trying to build tension around the 2011 tsunami, seemed a bit weird to me. I thought tsunamis were only a problem close to shore or in relatively shallow water. The boat mentioned in the beginning was in 500 feet deep water, and indeed the article said the tsunami passed imperceptibly.

Anyway, otherwise I thought this was an enjoyable read.

JeremyNT• 2 years ago

In fiction, underwater cables play an important role in Stephenson's 1999 classic Cryptonomicon [0]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon

Woshiwuja• 2 years ago

Presentation is great theverge W

zepearl• 2 years ago

The article has interesting infos but its presentation is in my opinion a bit annoying: it doesn't focus, it's subjectively very very long to read, most animations are superfluous (excluding the one of the cables throughout the years).

Some snippets which I thought are interesting or just funny:

==========================

he worked at his parents’ fish market from the age of 12. A teenage love of American rock ‘n’ roll led to a desire to learn English, which led him to take a job at 18 as a switchboard operator at the telecom company KDDI as a means to practice. When he was 26, he transferred to a cable landing station in Okinawa because working on the beach would let him perfect his windsurfing. This was his introduction to cable maintenance and also where he met his wife.

Kobayashi learned to fish off the side of the ship and attempted to improve the repetitive cuisine by serving his crewmates sashimi. (His favorite is squid, but his colleagues would prefer he use the squid to catch mackerel.)

There are 77 cable ships in the world, according to data supplied by SubTel Forum, but most are focused on the more profitable work of laying new systems. Only 22 are designated for repair, and it’s an aging and eclectic fleet.

“We’re all happy to spend billions to build new cables, but we’re not really thinking about how we’re going to look after them,”

[after/during the earthquake]...engineers in Tokyo network operation centers watched as one cable after another failed. By the next morning, seven of Japan’s 12 transpacific cables were severed.

...the majority of the faults were located offshore of the ongoing nuclear meltdown at Fukushima. Ship operators deemed assistance too risky, which meant that, for the time being, the Ocean Link was on its own.

The first submarine cable, strung across the English Channel in 1850, survived for a single day before — in what may be apocryphal cable industry slander — a French eel fisherman accidentally hooked it, sliced off a piece, and came ashore bragging about his discovery of a new type of metal seaweed.

[this refers probably to when Google started laying own cables?] Starting around 2016, tech companies that previously purchased bandwidth from telcos began pouring billions of dollars into cable systems of their own, seeking to ensure their cloud services were always available and content libraries synced. The result has been not just a boom in new cables but a change in the topology of the internet. “In the old days we connected population centers,” said Constable, the former Huawei Marine executive. “Now we connect data centers. Eighty percent of traffic crossing the Atlantic is probably machines talking to machines.”

Maintenance providers regard these changes with ambivalence. The cable boom means there will be no shortage of cables to fix, but it also means a future of negotiating with a handful of tech giants that can use their tremendous buying power to squeeze ship operators further.

The work is extraordinarily delicate. Cables must be stripped of their polyurethane sheaths, copper conducting tubes, wire armor, and enamel coating until the clear glass threads themselves are exposed. Kurokawa then takes a glass strand from each cable, cleans them in a sonic bath (touching them risks damage and splinters), cleaves their ends at perfect right angles, and places them inside a black toaster-sized box called a fusion splicer, their ends almost but not quite touching. In an instant, the device aligns the ends and zaps an electric arc between them, melting the glass together. Kurokawa then winds the newly spliced fiber into a metal tube called a joint box and does it all again for the next fiber strand. The entire process can take 20 hours, with Kurokawa and his team working in shifts. Every step demands hunched, jeweler-like focus as they seek perfect precision — not in a seismically isolated clean room but in the belly of a rocking ship. Each joint is expected to function untouched under crushing pressure for at least 25 years.

==========================

The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat

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