Re: [nznog] Labour alleges failure of Southern Cross Cable

I can't say I know a lot about undersea cables, but I'd think there'd be a way to intercept Southern Cross before it gets to Auckland and route it to Wellington or such. So a whole new cable may not be necessary.from that point of view. That said Coromandel or New Plymouth is probably simpler/cheaper. If it could be intercepted and go to both, even better. I'm really not buying this Pacific Fibre being reintroduced by Kim Dotcom after he sues the US thing. But I suppose as far as backup goes we only need to get to Australia. Ben. On Fri, Nov 09, 2012 at 05:09:17PM +1300, Paul Brislen wrote:

I wrote about exactly this issue (volcanoes and redundancy) this week:

http://tuanz.org.nz/blog/2012/11/8/critical-infrastructure

The two landing sites are within 15km of each other and while the risk of a volcanic eruption is low (actually it's unknown - we assume it's low) the damage from such an event would be devastating.

-----Original Message----- From: nznog-bounces(a)list.waikato.ac.nz [mailto:nznog-bounces(a)list.waikato.ac.nz] On Behalf Of Sam Silvester Sent: Friday, 9 November 2012 5:04 p.m. To: Kris Price Cc: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: Re: [nznog] Labour alleges failure of Southern Cross Cable

On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 1:20 PM, Kris Price wrote:

...

Grandstanding, yes. But then again, isn't there actually a real problem here? With both spans of Southern Cross landing within a stones throw of each other (~30 kms), and on the northern side of a tiny little peninsula from the rest of the country, to boot. Isn't there any concern that a Christchurch like event in Auckland could damage both spans, knocking NZ offline for a couple of months while ships were tasked to repair them?

Without especially agreeing nor disagreeing with that - I suspect it's a case of not making perfection the enemy of the good.

True geographic diversity is expensive especially in terms of submarine cables. I'd contend (happy for somebody to jump in here if my instinct is wrong) is that whilst it's shitty when multiple cables get cut due to those kind of events, even having two cables on a similar path can be good because it's less likely one administrative group will take down the whole system.

I suspect the number of human error or hardware failures far exceed the number of earthquakes and the like.

Sam _______________________________________________ NZNOG mailing list NZNOG(a)list.waikato.ac.nz http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/nznog _______________________________________________ NZNOG mailing list NZNOG(a)list.waikato.ac.nz http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/nznog