Not so expensive
So we are looking at 7-figure numbers, max?
Internet speeds on the UK island of Jersey have been slashed – literally – after a ship's anchor destroyed three submarine cables linking the isle to the British mainland. Broadband speeds on the Channel island immediately slowed to a trickle after the data cables, owned by telco JT, and the voice traffic cable, owned by ISP …
Deciding where to lay a submarine cable involves a bit more than 'just here looks ok."
As well as having the right beach conditions, the sea bottom between the landing sites needs to be suitable, existing cables need to be avoided if at all possible and you also need to avoid having some US TLA tell you "You can't put that there - no I'm not going to tell you why!"
That sounds just like a University in Southampton, where all the safety of life, fire, disabled toilet and building alarms all depend on an off site it departments optical fibre piecemeal network, along with all the now Skype only telephones and normal it. Burning buildings down is a speciality activity of their Electronics and C SCI depth, during one outage the only reason the control room knew there was a fire alarm was down to the solitary security guard patrolling seeing a building emptying and going to investigate!
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"England", or "English" come from a corruption of Angland, or 'land of the Angles', of Anglo-Saxon fame.
So the Normans nicked it off the English, who had nicked it off the Britons who had... well, you get the idea, we're a land of immigrant mongrels.
"From the English or from the Saxons, who weren't English either, AFAIK?"
England = Angle Land.
And it does amuse me the number of people who seem to think that before the Angles & Saxons rocked up that what was to become England was a land filled with blond haired blue eyed pure bred celts all speaking some ancestor of Welsh. Perhaps they've forgotten about the Roman Empire which ruled Brittania for FOUR HUNDRED years. Any pure bred celts had long since be consigned to the corners of the british isles by the time Rome left and a lot of people would have been speaking some version of Latin.
"Any pure bred celts had long since be consigned to the corners of the british isles by the time Rome left and a lot of people would have been speaking some version of Latin."
The general archaeological view seems to be that most of the Romano-British population were the descendants of the pre-Roman Iron Age population who had simply adopted elements Roman culture. The colonia, however, would have added retired legionaries although these were recruited from across the empire.
"The general archaeological view seems to be that most of the Romano-British population were the descendants of the pre-Roman Iron Age population who had simply adopted elements Roman culture. The colonia, however, would have added retired legionaries although these were recruited from across the empire."
Quite so, but over the course of 400 years you're going to have enough relationships (consensual or not) between romans and the locals that by the time the last legionary left its highly unlikely that many people at least in the south of england were 100% celtic especially given many non british roman citizens probably stayed behind anyway.
The Celts only arrived sometime in the Iron Age (probably around 500BC), displacing the Britons who were already here. So they are incomers as well. The previous (non Celtic, and probably non-Indo-European) language still survives in some place names, but not much else.
Doubtless there were other waves of migration before that.
"Doubtless there were other waves of migration before that."
Especially when what we now call Doggerland was still above the waterlevel and what is now the UK was just an outcropping of the rest of europe. There doesn't appear to be any archaeological evidence of any border controls either so it was just a free for all as far immigrants were concerned. Anyone brave enough to hitch a lift on a Mammoth was in.
English or from the Saxons, who weren't English either
Angles, Saxons and Jutes - all slightly different shades of the same old Germanic swatch..
(BTW - The Saxons referred to themselves as English [or the equivalent Saxon spelling of the word] so I think we can quantify them as English..)
Not Modern English though - we are a thoroughly mongrel[1] race and proud to be so - those of us who are not UKIP/BNP nutters anyway.
[1] My surname is probably Norse-derived, my family roots are in Forest of Dean even though my Dad was born in Yorkshire, my mother is half-Welsh and was born in Dorset. My wife has a blood type that is most common on the Iberian Peninsula [even though she is Cornish/Devon] whilst mine is the prototypical Celtic.
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"those of us who are not UKIP/BNP nutters anyway."
Whilst the BNP may be obsessed with race, UKIP is concerned with EU control and immigration numbers and nothing to do with race. Unless you're saying that the Polish (for example) are a different race to the English. If so which race are they? As someone who voted UKIP I'm afraid I'm a bit tired of the same old tar with the same brush BS one gets from those of the left because its too much effort (or too hard) for them to differentiate. It would be like me saying Polly Toynbee is no different to Stalin simply because they're both on the left.
> Whilst the BNP may be obsessed with race, UKIP is concerned with EU control and immigration numbers
Pah, we're all bloody immigrant, we're all bloody Africans when it comes down to it.
Back to the topic of the story, are we sure it was an accident?
Or were these sub-sea cables dug up as Jersey wasn't monitoring their populations browsing habits properly and now there a chance to splice in some proper monitoring equipment?
Mine's the one with the black helicopter and tin foil hat in the pockets.
"Pah, we're all bloody immigrant, we're all bloody Africans when it comes down to it."
We're all bacteria if you go back far enough, so what? That reductio ad absurdum argument is just a lazy dismissal of a situation that is clearly too complex for people like you to discuss.
> situation that is clearly too complex for people like you to discuss.
Hardly, I just happen to enjoy winding racists up, that's all.
I also enjoy winding up extremist white supremacist Christians by reminding them that Jesus was an Arab Jew and so quite unlikely to be blue eyed and blond.
Now I wondering which camp of people I enjoy winding up you'd put yourself in. I suspect neither of the above.
Now have a nice day
I really believe that is the first time in my life anyone has suggested that I'm a lefty. I'm impressed by your originality, but you clearly didn't read what I wrote. You normally write quite sensible things here. What I had said which you failed to read was that I suspect that you wouldn't consider yourself of either of those things.
Please read carefully before picking up the flame thrower.
...The fact that he was actually left wing...
Personally I reckon that at the extremes, "left"and "right" are indistinguishable anyway. Totalitarianism vs. Libertarianism is where the important action is and on that scale, Hitler and Stalin are one and the same politically.
Greatest giggle right now is the Corbynite "Momentum" types describing anyone who disagrees with them as a Nazi. I find the idea of being called a Nazi by a bunch of frothing anti-Semites, who also seem to think that threats of extermination and kicking people's windows in are valid political strategies, somewhat ironic.
"Stalin ran a centrally planned economy."
As did Hitler, or technically Göring as he was in charge of it, when setting up the Vierjahresplanbehörde in 1936.
BTW, Nazi is shorthand for Nationalsozialismus.
No, I think I'll go with the 'it's totalitarianism vs libertarianism' argument as posted above. Assholes are assholes, any which way you dress them up.
We know Hitler was left wing too, but that he was right wing is even taught in schools, so I wasn't going to touch that one.
Arseholes are arseholes, yes, but my original point was that on the Graun, one must be described as rightwing to be deemed an arsehole, whether that's accurate or not.
"My wife has a blood type that is most common on the Iberian Peninsula [even though she is Cornish/Devon]"
In the Iberian Peninsula you can find some interesting Celtic artefacts, v similar to what I've seen in Ireland. And one of my Scottish friends who emigrated to Portugal discovered that some of the music they play on their bagpipes there is very similar to what he grew up with.
Guess we're all immigrants, just some more recent arrivals than others.
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An entertaining story, but I think probably, when the fuss dies down a bit, it will turn out that someone unplugged the cables so they could run a vacuum cleaner or boil a kettle. My experience has been that network failures run as follows:
Vacuum Cleaner : 65%
Coffee Time! : 20%
Idiots with a big carbide wheel cutting up the street : 5%
Jim from Spares taking it upon himself to "tidy" wiring closet : 5%
Horseplay with the forklift, compressor and sundry other kit : 4%
Miscellaneous electronic infrastructure failures : 1%
"Jim from Spares taking it upon himself to "tidy" wiring closet : 5%"
I used to work for an organisation that needed clocks to be accurate. They had an MSF timeserver. It suddenly started being unreliable after years of good service. The reason turned out to be some idiot getting into the crawl space who kept finding a length of wire only connected at one end, so he cut it off "to be tidy". The engineer would replace it when he found that it was missing because it was the radio clock aerial. It took ages to find which idiot was cutting off the aerial because he wasn't on site most weeks.
The cream of the Russian navy passed through those waters not long ago. Now I'm not suggesting there's any connection but what would it take to cut off, say the UK by a belligerent party?
Are cables the sorts of things you can find and plant little devices on to be triggered en masse and remotely at a future date, or are they regularly "patrolled" in some way by say a remote underwater vehicle to check for such things/natural hazards etc?
Could the same also be done in respect of the power interconnect(s?) between ourselves and the continent?
Generally speaking, cable covering a longer distance is already likely to be spliced in a lot of places - there are limits to how big rolls of cable can be after all. Especially sea cable that's typically quite tick due to armor, possibly power supply to amplifiers/regenerators (which of course are spliced in as well), etc.
In this case the cable isn't exactly on the scale of crossing the Atlantic, but like the previous poster said, the loss from a properly done fusion splice is very small. Unless the transmission equipment is located right at the landing site there are still gonna be a lot of them regardless. Especially if it's located in some city - in a metro network you can easily have 10 splice/patch points just going from one end to the other.
Oddly enough, at least one of the cables (HUGO) is reclaimed transatlantic cable - it was built from cable reclaimed from Gemini South.
http://www.bratch.co.uk/channelislandssubmarinecables.html
http://atlantic-cable.com//Cables/CableTimeLine/index1951.htm (To find info on Gemini South)
http://atlantic-cable.com//Cables/CableTimeLine/index2001.htm (To find info on HUGO)
Presumably people laying submarine fibres always specify enough power margin to cope with the covert beamsplitters that the NSA, GCHQ, Russians and Chinese are probably going to install on it, so a little repair should be no problem.
Gluing the cable back together? If it was only that easy, find one end, cleave and join on a length of cable, pay out whilst finding second cable end, and the correct one in this case, lift cleave and joint to new length, drop back onto seabed if deep, bury if 'shallow'. If Alcatel cables add several days for delays in Alcatel's 'inspector' to join ship, cleaning all the tar and bitumen out of the cable so you can actually joint it and reseal the core by injection molding polyethylene around the core, that's after trying to 'weld' the fiber cores together, a 10 percent chance of success with each individual core with Alcatel's manual fusion splicers their inspector insists you use is considered to be good, instead of the automated Japanese fusion splicers with a 99 percent first time success rate. Yes I worked in that 'industry', and its hard, dirty and dangerous work.