Server Error in '/' Application.
The process cannot access the file 'C:\Users\www.womble.co.za\cable_map\landing_stations.js' because it is being used by another process.
Line 236: public void PutFileContents(string filename, string txt)
Line 237: {
Line 238: TextWriter tw = new StreamWriter(filename);
Line 239: tw.Write(txt);
Line 240: tw.Close();
It seems that there is a race condition where each web request tries to open this file, and Windows doesn't let you have the file open multiple times (at least with the chosen options).
If people near San Luis Obispo are interested in seeing the maps of the cable landings there, check out the library at Cuesta College, they have a huge binder there mapping out the full route of cables from where they land in Los Osos to San Luis Obispo.
I also spoke with an electrician who worked at the landing site in Los Osos, he said that the building is very nondescript and that the stairwell has a huge mural of what one might see if they were actually in the water, and not in a stairwell.
Quite a lot of those cables split in the middle of the ocean but zooming in I don't see any islands. What would such an undersea junction look like? Or would it be a platform?
I have a feeling they're actually separate cables that are laid at the same time. Maybe they're even bound together in some way. It would be interesting to know for sure.
From Svalbard you can see pretty much every polar orbit once per orbit, plus Norway is politically stable and very liberal with research licenses there, plus it’s warm for the latitude. So there’s demand from the kind of people who have polar-orbiting satellites that produce a lot of data.
Just to confirm your arguments, I'm quoting from from http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article545833.ece:
"Although stretching cable for about 3,000 kilometers from Andoeya to Longyearbyen seems inconvenient, the spot has been carefully chosen. Svalbard Satellite Station (SvalSat) has specialized in retrieving data from satellites in polar orbit..."
And then from http://www.ksat.no/Products/Svalsat.htm:
"The satellite coverage at this latitude holds unique opportunities and SvalSat is the only commercial ground station in the world able to provide all-orbit-support (14 of 14 orbits) to owners and operators of polar orbiting satellites."
The earth/ground station on Svalbard is a key site for collecting remote sensing data from polar orbiting satellites, such as those from NOAA, due to its close proximity to the north pole (many of these satellites are polar orbitors; e.g. follow an orbit which almost crosses over the pole).
"The Spitsbergen Treaty of 1920 recognizes Norwegian sovereignty, and the 1925 Svalbard Act made Svalbard a full part of the Kingdom of Norway. They also established Svalbard as a free economic zone and a demilitarized zone."
and
"Svalbard is a demilitarized zone, as the treaty prohibits the establishment of military installations. Norwegian military activity is limited to fisheries surveillance by the Norwegian Coast Guard. The treaty requires Norway to protect the natural environment."
You can't scroll across the Pacific, you can't even see the lines across the Pacific as whole with both ends. But Bing maps can do that, what's wrong here? It's quite a problem with this type of map.
Not very surprising, but there is a perfect correlation between the major "junctions" and Amazon's 4 data centers spanning the world, situated in North California (us-west-1), North Virginia (us-east-1), Ireland (eu-west-1) and Singapore (ap-southeast-1).
Pretty interesting stuff. I was hoping to correlate some of my traceroutes with these cables to figure out how my own international traffic is routed, but it seems that with the rise of optical routing, not enough intermediate hops show up for me to figure it out. For example, San Jose to Copenhagen seems to be a single hop for me, so I have no idea what transatlantic cable my data takes:
Ah yeah, that's probably more likely than layer 1 routing. There does seem to be an increase in it, though; unless I'm mistaken, I seem to recall that 10 years ago it was a bit easier to get a rough idea of the geographical hops a packet was taking. It seems quite a few large providers these days only do one layer 3 hop, so all you see is the entry and exit at the borders of their network.
And yes, they are laid on the floor, mostly. In shallows they may be armored against sharks or plowed in to protect against anchors.
The Neal Stephenson, WIRED article is an excellent read, but honestly unless you have a new Safari or some bookmarklet to extract the content from the surrounding flashing lights and popping ads you will probably go blind before you finish it.
I've always wondered this as well. Are they contained in pipes or something? How do they deal with mountains and cliffs in the ocean? Do they go right over them or around them? Does anybody have information about the physical characteristics of how this works?
Plenty more of interest at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable, which covers the first transatlantic telegraph cable. Anything to do with electrical communications that smells of rubber and seawater makes me happy.
I have the same experience -- I'm getting very familiar ASP.NET crash page.
They didn't even bother to setup custom error page for production web site.
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The process cannot access the file 'C:\Users\www.womble.co.za\cable_map\landing_stations.js' because it is being used by another process.
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There are about 50 repairs in the Atlantic each year. The cables are damaged by anchors and fishing lines and even things like shark bites and whale entanglements.
I thought about this too, so I let my imagination wander:
Solution 1: Perhaps there's a ship pulling a cable attached to a reel, and it periodically drops the cable in the ocean with an anchor weight. The first few times they did this, the engineers miscalculated the length of the cable. As the ship sailed on, the reel got ripped from the ship's hull, the boat sank and the captain didn't have a connection to send an SOS. Ironically, the connection was at the bottom of the ocean, still attached to the reel.
Solution 2: Organize dolphins to pull cables across the Atlantic. Unfortunately, the spinner dolphin species was chosen, resulting in many miles of twisted fiber-optic cable. As you know, having kinks in fiber-optic cables is a bad thing.
Solution 3: Use the Blues Brothers' car (with a cop engine, cop suspension and cop brakes), roll up the windows and drive across the sea floor, laying the cable down. I think this is how they actually did it
