[LINK] TPG international fibre cable fault - where was that break again?

Chris Johnson Chris.Johnson at anu.edu.au
Tue Feb 9 14:23:13 AEDT 2016


Australia has a broken international cable. From the TPG website  "The
TPG Network Operations Centre received multiple alarms for the PPC-1
cable system between Sydney and Guam. The alarms indicated that a
submarine line card had lost its payload. "
[I guess this is jargon for something like a broken connection]

"A Network Incident ticket was created and the issue was immediately
escalated to the PPC-1 transmission engineering team."
Isn't it nice to be told that they have a standard way of handling
faults by escalating incident tickets - but it isn't really important
information.
The fault has been located:
"The Transmission engineering team, in collaboration with
http://www.distancefromto.net/distance-from/Guam/to/Sydneyinfrastructure
vendors, completed preliminary investigations and have found a fibre
fault approximately 4,590 kilometres from Guam."
That sounds serious. It's a long way away. "Estimated restoration:
Monday 7 March." (30 days+)
But: the distance from Sydney to Guam? approximately 5,304 km (in a
straight line) [http://www.distancefromto.net/distance-from/Guam/to/Sydney].
So the fault is actually about 714 km from Sydney. That's closer than
the Gold Coast! If that had been announced it would sound easier to fix
than the distance of 4590 km from Guam...  is this just a PR cover
story, it's a long way away so it's reasonable to expect to take a month
to fix it?
It's probably a reasonable delay anyway - need to get hold of a cable
repair ship, they don't grow on palm trees - but let's have more
carefully thought information.

-- 
Chris Johnson



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