Re: BBC reports Kenya fiber break

[Steven Bellovin <smb () cs columbia edu>]

On Feb 29, 2012, at 11:17 17AM, Marshall Eubanks wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 10:08 AM, Justin M. Streiner
> <streiner () cluebyfour org> wrote:
> > On Wed, 29 Feb 2012, Rodrick Brown wrote:
> >
> > > There's about 1/2 a dozen or so known private and government research
> > > facilities on Antarctica and I'm surprised to see no fiber end points on
> > > that continent? This can't be true.
> >
> >
> > Constantly shifting ice shelves and glaciers make a terrestrial cable
> > landing very difficult to implement on Antarctica.  Satellite connectivity
> > is likely the only feasible option.  There are very few places in
> > Antarctica that are reliably ice-free enough of the time to make a viable
> > terrestrial landing station.  Getting connectivity from the landing station
> > to other places on the continent is another matter altogether.
>
> Apparently at least one long fiber pull has been contemplated.
>
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/2207259.stm
>
> (Note : the headline is incorrect - the Internet reached the South Pole in 1994,
> via satellite, of course :
> http://www.southpolestation.com/trivia/90s/ftp1.html )
>
> As far as I can tell, this was never done, and the South Pole gets its
> Internet mostly via
> TDRSS.
>
> http://www.usap.gov/technology/contentHandler.cfm?id=1971


Yes.  I had discussions with some of their network support folks circa 1994 -- with
limited bandwidth (DS0, as I recall) and only a few hours of connectivity per day,
when a satellite was over the horizon, they were very concerned about attackers
clogging their link.

                --Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb