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Arctic Link submarine cable

Starting this summer, a convoy of ice breakers and specially-adapted polar ice-rated cable laying ships will begin to lay the first e'er trans-Arctic Ocean submarine fiber optic cables. Two of these cables, chosen Artic Fibre and Arctic Link, will cross the Northwest Passage which runs through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. A tertiary cablevision, the Russian Optical Trans-Arctic Submarine Cable System (ROTACS), will skirt the north declension of Scandinavia and Russia. All three cables will connect the United Kingdom to Japan, with a smattering of branches that will provide high-speed cyberspace access to a scattering of Arctic Circumvolve communities. The completed cables are estimated to cost betwixt $600 million and $1.five billion each.

All three cables are being laid for the same reasons: Redundancy and speed. As it stands, it takes roughly 230 milliseconds for a packet to become from London to Tokyo; the new cables volition reduce this by 30% to 170ms. This speed-up will be gained by virtue of a much shorter run: Currently, packets from the United kingdom to Japan either have to traverse Europe, the Middle East, and the Indian Ocean, or the Atlantic, US, and Pacific, both routes racking up around 15,000 miles in the process. It'southward only 10,000 miles (16,000km) beyond the Arctic Body of water, and you lot don't have to mess around with whatsoever country crossings, either.

Russian Optical Trans-Arctic Submarine Cable System (ROTACS) between UK and JapanThe massive drop in latency is expected to supercharge algorithmic stock market place trading, where a difference of a few milliseconds can gain (or lose) millions of dollars. It is for this reason that a new cable is currently existence laid between the Great britain and U.s.a. — it will cost $300 million and shave "just" six milliseconds off the fastest link currently available. The lower latency volition as well exist a boon to other technologies that hinge heavily on the cyberspace, such as telemedicine (and teleconferencing) and education. Telephone calls and live news coverage would as well enjoy the significantly lower latency. Each of the fiber optic cables volition have a capacity in the terabits-per-second range, which volition probably come in handy too.

Beyond the stock markets, though, the principal advantage of the 3 new cables is added redundancy. Currently, almost every cable that lands in Asia goes through a choke betoken in the Center East or the Luzon Strait between the Philippine and South China seas. If a ship were to elevate an anchor across the wrong patch of seabed, billions of people could wake up to detect themselves either completely asunder from the internet or surfing with dial-upwards-like speeds. The three new cables volition all come up down from the north of Japan, through the relatively-empty Bering Sea — and the Arctic Sea, where each of the cables volition run for more than five,000 miles, is one of the least-trafficked parts of the earth. That said, the cables will withal have to be laid hundreds of meters beneath the surface to avoid the tails of roving icebergs.

The ROTACS cable path

Each cable will be laid past a pair of ships: an ice billow that leads the way, and a cable ship. Until at present it has been incommunicable to lay cables in the Arctic Ocean, but the retreat of the Arctic ocean ice means that the Northwest Passage is now mostly water ice-free from August to October; a big plenty window that cable can be laid fairly safely. Existing cable ships (and at that place aren't many of them) are all outfitted for balmier climes, and then all 3 cables will crave the employ of a polar ice-rated ship that has been retrofitted to carry cable-laying gear.

Read more about the secret world of submarine cables.

For more information on the Russian Optical Trans-Arctic Submarine Cable System (ROTACS), check out the Polarnet Projection (machine translated).

The Arctic Fibre and Arctic Link websites accept information on the North American cables.

[Image credit: New Scientist]