Geek heroes rescue Tonga from worst case fibre optic cable blackout(matangitonga.to)
matangitonga.to
Geek heroes rescue Tonga from worst case fibre optic cable blackout
https://matangitonga.to/2019/01/26/geek-heroes-rescue-tonga-worst%20case
9 comments
What a great story, a mix of quick hacking know-how, cooperation, and some good luck / remarkable foresight: "Fortunately for Tonga, EziNET had previously imported all the parts for a new satellite antenna that they were planning to install in March 2019. It was slow going because they had not been able to interest anyone in backing a Satellite Plan B for the country."
Temporary access via fixed aim vsat terminal and geostationary C or Ku band transponder capacity is actually a lot more expensive than o3b services, in $ per Mbps. But an o3b terminal is much costlier in terms of initial purchase cost, and perhaps this project doesn't meet the Mbps threshold or contract term length to make it worthwhile.
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Kudos to the guys!
The almost-outage as seen from global routing:
https://stat.ripe.net/widget/country-routing-stats#w.resourc...
The almost-outage as seen from global routing:
https://stat.ripe.net/widget/country-routing-stats#w.resourc...
Cable ship in Noumea. Switched contacts from Alcatel to somebody else but at least there's one within the right hemisphere.
There are always cable ships somewhere in the Pacific, on standby, for the jointly funded cable maintenance agreements. At any given time you can find one somewhere on the US west coast, or perhaps in port in Victoria or Vancouver. Same for the other side of the ocean.
Noumea to Tonga is a lot shorter!
It's a bit suspicious that it would break in two places at once. There was a panic in 2015 about Russian ships and submarines supposedly placed to be able to cut cables. You can imagine the havoc they could cause if they carried that out, perhaps combined with destroying a few satellites.
It’s not as unusual as you might think. Random failures can cluster. It’s why two paths is never enough if redundancy matters.
Yeah, it's most likely a normal failure. I only said "a bit" suspicious. I suppose it will takes weeks to get a cable ship out to Tonga to fix the breaks. Oh, a comment elsewhere says not so long.
Adding to that, the two cables are constrained by having the same endpoint and needing not-too-steep paths through the same landscape on the ocean bottom.
Reminds me of planning cables in a "backhoe safe" pattern out of a building so a single backhoe can't take out all of your connectivity in a single incident.
I read that as "Greek heroes" at first.
Internet access is a big deal for Tonga and they went to pains to establish good internet access to begin with, which articles about the crisis seem to not really make very clear:
Here's how a tiny Pacific island got better Internet than the US
https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-08-01/heres-how-tiny-pacifi...