Nope. this article isn’t really about ‘submarines as we normally think of them, or even about the luxury submarines slated to be built and tested at Subic Bay … anyone heard anything new about this project?

No, today I am going to talk about submarine cables and why, if you live in the Philippines or even deal with many people here, you need to think about from time to time.

Submarine cables.  Many people give no thought to how dial tone gets to their phones or bits fly onto their computer screens when they click on a website URL.  And that’s fine, because in order to be generally accepted and useful (and profitable) around the world, technology has to be made to look like “magic” to the consumer.

But there isn’t r3eally an “magic” in the David Copperfield sense involved.  Electrical pulses from my computer to yours, or my telephone to your telephone have to happen.  There are three ways you can make electrical pulses of energy “jump” the broad Pacific Ocean.  Radio waves, microwave links over a communications satellite or pulses of light in a fiber optic undersea cable.

Radio won’t serve the needs.  You can easily send signals and talk via voice radio across trans-oceanic distances, but conditions don’t allow radio to work, reliably, 24-7 and the bandwidth .. the amount of information that can be carried this way … is woefully smaller than the demand.  Won’t work for a 2010 solution.

Communications Satellites can be part of the solution.  They have been for years … more years than you might guess, the military had a classified system between Washington DC and Pearl Harbor in use for years, bouncing signals off the moon .. i is a satellite you know … long before people thought of businesses like Direct TV.  But satellites, literally, can’t carry the load.  The bandwidth available via data links across satellites is tiny in comparison to the present, much less the future, capacity of fiber optic cable.

And there’s another problem regarding Philippine/US communication via satellite. A satellite which can “see” the Philippines can’t “see” most of the US.  In many cases this leads to using twice the bandwidth, because signals from the Philippine would have to “land” somewhere, say Hawaii, and then get sent back up to another “bird” to be landed at their final destination.  In the satellite business we call this “double hopping”

It’s expensive, cumbersome, and most significant to modern day communications, causes near-unworkable delays.  I’m sure you’ve seen news shows on TV where the reported is in some far off country covering the latest disaster and when the news anchor asks a question there is a puzzling, annoying delay before the report hears the question and answers it.  This is common called latency … a good explanation of geostationary satellite latency here … and it makes usable Internet connectivity difficult.  This really leaves us only one good choice:

Undersea Fiber Optic Cables:  The Philippines is connected to the rest of of the world by several large commercial undersea cable systems.  Here’s an overview map that pretty much shows the world’s modern cable connectivity.  Better detail of modern cable connections is here.

The main international cables that serve the Philippines connect to the terrestrial (land-based) Internet system in Batangas, south of Manila and in San Fernando La Union, on the west coast of northern Luzon.

When I type on my computer here and send bits to the PhilFAQS web server, (which is located in Dallas, Texas, USA) the bits travel either to the west coast of the US, most often coming ashore at Seattle, or east through the Middle East and France and then back onto other cables across the Atlantic to enter the terrestrial US system at any of several US East coast cable “landings”.

The ‘rest of the Philippines’ connects to these undersea cable end points typically through two large domestic undersea cable systems that for a ring around the Philippines, landing at more than 20 Philippine population centers, the NDTN (National Digital Transmission Network) managed by TelicPhil , and the  DFON )Domestic Fibre Optic Network), owned and operated by PLDT.

Pretty interesting, how it all works out.  And, when it doesn’t?  How ever can they fix these amazing undersea lifelines?

It’s easy when you know how.  Here’s a picture of the KDDI Ocean Link .. I’ve had the [pleasure of being aboard this ship .. totally like a science fiction movie.  They can find a damaged cable anywhere in any ocean, grapple it up to the surface, slice in a new section and restore service.

The holds of this ship are like giant barrels, it can store about 5,000 miles of cable on-board, enough to lay a cable from Japan to the US west coast in only two trips.

So that’s the story, today, of how these bits got from my computer in Marilao to the my server in Dallas to your computer screen where ever you are “tuning in from”.

There’s an old saying that goes; “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” … and you know, to a 1945 model like me, this is pretty close to magic.

The “man behind the curtain” is often more interesting to me that the show the wizard puts on for the general public.

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