Alternative to SAT3 Cable

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dodgyknacker

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What alternatives are their to the SAT3 Cable, Would it be feasible to lay a cable on railtracks or roadsides all the way north to Europe through th Middle East as an altenative.

Any Ideas how we can bypass Telkom not by using wireless.
 
This is Africa - how long do you think the cable will stay next to the track??
 
laying cable over land would entail digging trenches and laying concrete piping all the way up Africa I'd imagine, which would probably cost a couple hundred million. So sure, if you got that kind of cash lying around and can convince all the african countries to play along.. go for it :p
 
No the problem is the politcal status of the other northern countries. It would be incredibly difficult to convince them to allow you to lay a cable through their country.
 
It would get stolen anyway :(

Gotta face the facts, thats why countries like Rwanda(i think) etc dont have cables, but wireless networks.
 
A story was going around on this forum that Eskom Enterprises which has a 15% stake in the SNO was going to lay on fibre to Namibia and connect to the SAT3 cable through that point.

A believable story as Eskom Network spans some of the Southern African Countries and Eskom spent R200 Million on cabling last year or the year before.

As I am not sure of any of these stories, corrections will be made as I find out more in time.
 
Latency on Satellite is too high. But throughput is great.
 
stoke said:
Why are you specifically excluding Wireless? Microwave works damn fast. A series of microwave towers (Requires line of sight) can do the job pretty damn well.
Click to expand...
Microwaved pigeon don't taste that good... :D Unfortunately Microwave throughput sucks compared to cable...
 
When you talk about achieved throughputs ranging in the terabits/second on a single fibre, I think cable is the only logical choice for continental interconnection
 
"Microwave throughput sucks". Yip.
The figures I'm hearing are 45 Mbps to 65 Mbps, where basic CAT5 is currenlty doing around 1000 Mbps (Okay - not 25 km in length of course.).
Fibre is the way to go.

Source:http://davidw.home.cern.ch/davidw/public/SubCables.html

<Q>An interesting aspect of AC-1 is that it seems to be the most purely "commercial" of cable systems, being fully financed by investors in Global Crossing whose main objective is to make successful investments, with no apparent interest in themselves operating as telecoms carriers or ISPs. The pricing is competitive, and "anyone" can buy capacity, with the minimum unit that can be acquired being an STM-1 (155 Mbps) circuit. Purchase of the first such unit costs about 8 M$ and annual maintenance and operation costs capped at a maximum of 250 K$, so the five year amortised cost of an STM-1 circuit is under 2 M$ per year, corresponding to some 25 K$ per year for a 2 Mbps circuit. This is about a factor 2.5 below the TAT-12/13 pricing for consortium members.</Q>

So - 2M$ per annum (5 years) for a 155 Mbps line spanning Brookhaven NY <-> England <-> Germany. This is pre 2001 prices, and it's NOT our cables. Interesting read, otherwise useless.
 
Microwave is line-of-sight communication. So in order to connect to Europe you will need lots of repeating stations which makes it quite daunting if not impossible.

Can you imagine reapeating stations in the middle of the dessert or the bush. Very difficult to service, I guess.
 
A microwave can do about 50 KM MAX before you need to repeat it.
Fibre optic can do about 250KM max and then needs to be re-amplified, or 500KM max one shot, no re-amplification.

But it's really expensive to lay fibre, I was wondering if sets of Microwave retransmitters every 40KM would be cheaper than the filbe option to maintain and install.
 
stoke: Even if they are cheaper to maintain and install, I doubt that the investment to throughput ratio matches fibre.
 
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