- Investigating outage
- Cable ship being provisioned
- Cable ship sailing to site
- Cable spliced
- Back online
Pretty annoying when it happens, but it seemed to me like there was a whole infrastructure to deal with cable snaps.
Sierra Leone is a great example, it has only one submarine cable connecting it, only one modern submarine cable landing station. There is now some terrestrial fiber that links Freetown to Monrovia, Liberia.
> Cable spliced
How does that happen, is there a submersible that goes down or is the cable hoisted up? It doesn't sound trivial.
there is not enough slack in a modern well-laid cable system to hoist an intact cable to the surface.
let's say you're an ISP in monrovia, liberia. you can buy for N dollars per month a non redundant, single 10 Gbps transport circuit via the ACE cable that comes out the other end at some carrier POP in france, non diverse.
now you want to achieve some sort of diversity in case your cable route is cut, as the present cable has been.
you need to buy another separate 10Gbps circuit from monrovia to accra, ghana, going the other direction, establish a node in accra, and then buy another (physically diverse, in a different submarine cable) 10 Gbps circuit from accra to western europe.
or buy a circuit from monrovia to cape town and then something that is guaranteed to be physically diverse from cape town onwards to the internet. either by getting a transport circuit from cape town to western europe/france/UK, or buying IP transit from .ZA ISPs, or some combination of the two.