[LINK] Aussie internet pain after Asian subsea cables cut

[Tom Worthington]

On 03/09/17 22:24, Stephen Loosley wrote:

> Aussie internet pain after Asian subsea cables cut ...

			LINKGRAM

  LINK INSTITUTE ACTIVATES EMERGENCY INTERNET PLAN FOR BROKEN CABLE

Canberra, 4 September 2017: In response to the broken subsea cables to 
Hong Kong, the Link Institute has activated its emergency Internet 
response plan.

The Australian government is providing two F/A-18E aircraft for a 
shuttle service from Singapore to Christmas Island, which has the
closest working mainland fibre connection to Australia with excess 
capacity. In place of bombs, the aircraft will be carrying the world's 
largest flash drives.

Dubbed the "Binary Berlin Airlift" or the "Supersonic Sneaker-net", this 
service will shuttle large data files internationally, providing a vital 
transport of very large data files for government, industry and home users.

Link Institute director Professor Clerphell said: “We have temporarily
routed via Singapore whilst the cable repairs are carried out. This 
project was previously a 'black" classified one for the Defence 
Department, but they have allowed it to be made public due to the 
current emergency".

Link Instutie researchers took ordinary SSD solid state disk drives and 
packed them in briefcase sized modules. Each module has 500 SSDs, and 
has a 30,000 terabyte capacity. Forty of the modules are packed into two 
modified external fuel tank on the F/A-18E aircraft, for a total of 
1,200,000 terabytes.

Clerphell commented that the amount of data the aircraft can carry would 
take ten hours to transmit by fiber optic cable. Traveling at well under 
its maximum speed, the F/A-18E can make the journey in under an hour, 
beating the cable.

One problem avoided was cooling: "We pack the SSDs in but cooling has 
not been a problem" Clerphell commented. Flying at more than 10 km high, 
the SSDs are cooled to below freezing and are only operated for a few 
minutes on the ground to transfer data, so they do not heat up.

Clerphell said that 98% of the traffic is expected to be cat videos.
"But with the recent Royal Family pregnancy announcement we might have 
to put in extra data capacity to cover the event".

ENDS

;-)


-- 
Tom Worthington, MEd, FACS CP.  http://www.tomw.net.au t +61(0)419496150
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