Submarine (& land) Fiber-Optic Cabling Project

[GWR]

This site details the submarine fiber-optic cabling projects completed by Jasmine International circa 1997:-

http://www.jasmine.com/corporate_insight/business_channels_jasminesub.htm

http://www.jasmine.com/corporate_insight/pic_sub/map.gif

Now (after all these years) I know why a fiber-optic cable was laid in a conduit alongside the old (inland section of Route 4) Hat-Yai to Satun road in the late 90s.

Such is the degree of transparency in Thailand! :rolleyes: I don't suppose the locals who were paid for the passage of this conduit are much wiser (what they have at the bottom of the garden) at this late date either. I was under the impression that the main fiber-optic link to the south ran along the main railway.

[GWR]

Mother Earth Mother Board
-The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth
By Neal Stephenson, Wired Magazine, December, 1996:-

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html?pg=1&topic=

Fascinating & amusing account of the completion of two separate legs of the intercontinental FLAG fiber-optic cable between Satun & Songkhla. It seems that the rationale for not running these cables in parallel is to avoid some buffalo on a JCB cutting the two cables in one fell swoop; and even opposite sides of the same road was considered too risky, as the same disaster could befall both sides of the road.

The writer describes the curious mixture of precision technology and relatively low-tech methods that were used to build the conduit:e.g, disposable lighters usually fulfilled the same function as a spirit level in setting up the numerous inspection and access chambers. This operation took place in the late 90s:-

The FLAG system, that mother of all wires, starts at Porthcurno, England, and proceeds to Estepona, Spain; through the Strait of Gibraltar to Palermo, Sicily; across the Mediterranean to Alexandria and Port Said, Egypt; overland from those two cities to Suez, Egypt; down the Gulf of Suez and the Red Sea, with a potential branching unit to Jedda, Saudia Arabia; around the Arabian Peninsula to Dubai, site of the FLAG Network Operations Center; across the Indian Ocean to Bombay; around the tip of India and across the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea to Ban Pak Bara, Thailand, with a branch down to Penang, Malaysia; overland across Thailand to Songkhla; up through the South China Sea to Lan Tao Island in Hong Kong; up the coast of China to a branch in the East China Sea where one fork goes to Shanghai and the other to Koje-do Island in Korea, and finally to two separate landings in Japan - Ninomiya and Miura, which are owned by rival carriers.

What is unusual about FLAG is not its length (although it will be the longest cable ever constructed) or its technology (which is shared by other cables) but how it came into existence. But that's a business question which will be dealt with later. First, the hacker tourist is going to travel a short distance up the Malay Peninsula to southern Thailand, one of the two places where FLAG passes overland. On a world map this looks about as difficult as throwing an extension cord over a sandbar, but when you actually get there, it turns out to be a colossal project

7° 3.467' N,100° 22.489' EFLAG manhole production site, southern Thailand

Large portions of this section were written in a hotel in Ban Hat Yai, Thailand, which is one of the information-transfer capitals of the planet regardless of whether you think of information transfer as bits propagating down an optical fiber, profound and complex religious faiths being transmitted down through countless generations, or genetic material being interchanged between consenting adults. Male travelers approaching Ban Hat Yai will have a difficult time convincing travel agents, railway conductors, and taxi drivers that they are coming only to look at a big fat wire, but the hacker tourist must get used to being misunderstood.

We stayed in a hotel with all the glossy accoutrements of an Asian business center plus a few perks such as partially used jumbo condom packages squirreled away on closet shelves, disconcertingly huge love marks on the sofas, and extraordinarily long, fine, black hairs all over the bathroom. While writing, I sat before a picture window looking out over a fine view of: a well-maintained but completely empty swimming pool, a green Carlsberg Beer billboard written in Thai script, an industrial-scale whorehouse catering to Japanese "businessmen," a rather fine Buddhist temple complex, and, behind that, a district of brand-new high-rise hotels built to cater to the burgeoning information-transfer industry, almost none of which has anything to do with bits and bytes. Tropical storms rolled through, lightning flashed, I sucked down European beers from the minibar and tried to cope with a bad case of information overload. FLAG is a huge project, bigger and more complicated than many wars, and to visit even chunks of this cable operation is to be floored by it.

We first met Jim Daily and Alan Wall underneath that big Carlsberg sign, sitting out in a late-afternoon rainstorm under an umbrella, having a couple of beers - "the only ferangs here," as Wall told me on the phone, using the local term for foreign devil. Daily is American, 2 meters tall, blond, blue-eyed, khaki-and-polo-shirted, gregarious, absolutely plain-spoken, and almost always seems to be having a great time. Wall is English, shorter, dark-haired, impeccably suited, cagey, reticent, and dry. Both are in their 50s. It is of some significance to this story that, at the end of the day, these two men unwind by sitting out in the rain and hoisting a beer, paying no attention whatsoever to the industrial-scale whorehouse next door. Both of them have seen many young Western men arrive here on business missions and completely lose control of their sphincters and become impediments to any kind of organized activity. Daily hired Wall because, like Daily, he is a stable family man who has his act together. They are the very definition of a complementary relationship, and they seem to be making excellent progress toward their goal, which is to run two really expensive wires across the Malay Peninsula.

[GWR]

Mother Earth Mother Board
By Neal Stephenson, Wired Magazine, December, 1996 (Continued):-

Daily works out of Bangkok, the place where banks are headquartered, contracts are written, and 50-ton cranes are to be had. Alan "the ferang" Wall lives in Ban Hat Yai, the center of the FLAG operation in Thailand, cruising the cable routes a couple of times a week, materializing unpredictably in the heart of the tropical jungle in a perfectly tailored dark suit to inspect, among other things, FLAG's chain of manhole-making villages.

There were seven of these in existence during the summer of 1996, all lying along one of the two highways that run across the isthmus between the Andaman and the South China Seas. These highways, incidentally, are lined with utility poles carrying both power and communications wires. The tops of the poles are guarded by conical baskets about halfway up. The baskets prevent rats from scampering up the poles to chew away the tasty insulation on the wires and poisonous snakes from slithering up to sun themselves on the crossbars, a practice that has been known to cause morale problems among line workers.

The manhole-making village we are visiting on this fine, steamy summer day has a population of some 130 workers plus an unknown number of children. The village was founded in the shade of an old, mature rubber plantation. Along the highway are piles of construction materials deposited by trucks: bundles of half-inch rebar, piles of sand and gravel. At one end of the clearing is a double row of shelters made from shiny new corrugated metal nailed over wooden frames, where the men, women, and children of the village live. On the end of this is an open-air office under a lean-to roof, equipped with a whiteboard - just like any self-respecting high tech company. Chickens strut around flapping their wings uselessly, looking for stuff to peck out of the ground.

When the day begins, the children are bused off to school, and the men and women go to work. The women cut the rebar to length using an electric chop saw. The bars are laid out on planks with rows of nails sticking out of them to form simple templates. Then the pieces of rebar are wired together to create cages perhaps 2 meters high and 1.5 meters on a side. Then the carpenters go to work, lining the cage inside and out with wooden planks. Finally, 13 metric tons of cement are poured into the forms created by the planks. When the planks are taken away, the result is a hollow, concrete obelisk with a cylindrical collar projecting from the top, with an iron manhole cover set into it. Making a manhole takes three weeks.

Meanwhile, along the highway, trenches are being dug - quickly scooped out of the lowland soil with a backhoe, or, in the mountains, laboriously jackhammered into solid rock. A 50-ton crane comes to the village, picks up one manhole at a time using lifting loops that the villagers built into its top, and sets it on a flatbed truck that transports it to one of the wider excavations that are spaced along the trench at intervals of 300 to 700 meters. The manholes will allow workers to climb down to the level of the buried cable, which will stretch through a conduit running under the ground between the manholes.

The crane lowers the manhole into the excavation. A couple of hard-hatted workers get down there with it and push it this way and that, getting it lined up, while other workers up on the edge of the pit help out by shoving on it with a big stick. Finally it settles gingerly into place, atop its prepoured pad. The foreman clambers in, takes a transparent green disposable lighter from his pocket, and sets it down sideways on the top of the manhole. The liquid butane inside the lighter serves as a fluid level, verifying that the manhole is correctly positioned.

Not one but two entirely separate pairs of conduits are being created in this fashion. Both of them run from the idyllic sandy beach of Ban Pak Bara on the west to the paradisiacal sandy beach of Songkhla on the east - both of them are constructed in the same way, to the same specifications. Both of them run along highways. The southern route takes the obvious path, paralleling a road that runs in a relatively straight line between the two endpoints for 170 kilometers. But the other route jogs sharply northward just out of Ban Pak Bara, runs up the coast for some distance, turns east, and climbs up over the bony spine of the peninsula, then turns south again and finally reaches Songkhla after meandering for some 270 kilometers. Unlike the southern route, which passes almost exclusively over table-flat paddy land, easily excavated with a backhoe, the northern route goes for many kilometers over solid rock, which must be trenched with jackhammers and other heavy artillery, filled with galvanized steel conduit, and then backfilled with gravel and concrete.

This raises questions. The questions turn out to have interesting answers. I'll summarize them first and then go into detail. Q: Why bother running two widely separated routes over theMalay Peninsula?

A: Because Thailand, like everywhere else in the world, is full ofidiots with backhoes.

Q: Isn't that a pain in the ass?

A: You have no idea.

Q: Why not just go south around Singapore and keep the cable in the water, then?

A: Because Singapore is controlled by the enemy.

Q: Who is the enemy?

A: FLAG's enemies are legion.

The reason for the difficult northern route is FLAG's pursuit of diversity, which in this case is not a politically correct buzzword (though FLAG also has plenty of that kind of diversity) but refers to the principle that one should have multiple, redundant paths to make the system more robust. Diversity is not needed in the deep ocean, but land crossings are viewed as considerably more risky. So FLAG decided, early on, to lay two independent cables on two different routes, instead of one.

The indefatigable Jim Daily, along with his redoubtable inspector Ruzee, drove us along every kilometer of both of these routes over the course of a day and a half. "Let me ask you a naïve question," I said to him, once I got a load of the big rock ridge he was getting ready to cut a trench through. "Why not just put one cable on one side of that southern highway and another cable on the opposite side?" I found it hard to imagine a backhoe cutting through both sides of the highway at once."

They just wanted to be sure that there was no conceivable disaster that could wipe out both routes at the same time," he shrugged.

FLAG has envisioned every possible paranoid disaster scenario that could lead to a failure of a cable segment and has laid action plans that will be implemented if this should happen. For example, it has made deals with its competitors so that it can buy capacity from them, if it has to, while it repairs a break (likewise, the competitors might reserve capacity from FLAG for the same reason). Despite all this, FLAG is saying in this case: "We are going to cut a trench across a 50-mile-wide piece of rock because we think it will make our cable infinitesimally more reliable." Essentially, they have to do it, because otherwise no one will entrust valuable bits to their cable system.

Why didn't they keep it in the water? Opinions vary on this: pro-FLAG people argue that the Straits, with all of their ship traffic, are a relatively hazardous place to put a submarine cable and that a terrestrial crossing of the Malay Peninsula is a tactical masterstroke. FLAG skeptics will tell you that the terrestrial crossing is a necessity imposed on them because Singapore Telecom made the decision that they didn't want to be connected to FLAG.