Re: [Starlink] Starlink for Tonga?

[Jeremy Austin <jeremy@aterlo.com>]

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Bravo.

On Tue, Apr 19, 2022 at 5:06 PM Ulrich Speidel <u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz>
wrote:

> FWIW, a few weeks ago I had a fit of creative rage after someone asked
> whether it would even make sense for Tonga to rebuild the cables. It's
> resulted in an APNIC blog, which has just been published, and which argues
> that we've been approaching cable projects in the Pacific from the wrong
> end as dead-end streets to islands, rather than aiming for a resilient
> cable mesh that results in redundancy for everyone, including the bigger
> economies around the place:
>
>
> https://blog.apnic.net/2022/04/20/rethinking-submarine-fibre-cable-projects-south-pacific/
> On 20/04/2022 12:43 am, Ulrich Speidel wrote:
>
> I can probably comment on this.
>
> The international cable went back into service on the 22nd of February,
> one day before the official commencement of service to Tonga by Starlink.
> Now I should probably add here that you can't order Starlink in Tonga -
> they sent 50-odd terminals care of the Tongan government, and that's it.
> Since these were no longer needed in Tongatapu, they were meant to go to
> various of the other islands. The "Reliance" wasn't able to recover much of
> the domestic cable and for lack of spares wasn't able to fix this one. It
> subsequently left the cable grounds, unable to dock in Tonga due to Covid
> restrictions. New cable is on order in France but probably about another 8
> months away, minimum.
>
> The biggest other islands, Vava'u and Ha'apai (more precisely, Lifuka -
> pronounced Li-Foo-Kah) already had other satellite links in service, and
> quite a bit of the GEO capacity directed at Tongatapu was shifted to them
> post Tongatapu's reconnection. So I'd expect most of the terminals to end
> up on some of the smaller islands - quite who gets to use them there I'm
> not privy to.
>
> I understand that the government technician trying one of the Dishys in
> Tongatapu got 300 Mb/s down out of it, probably not surprising given that
> there wouldn't have been any competing traffic. Alas, I understand that
> service is a bit discontinuous, which is to be expected. I've tried to ask
> them as to how frequent and long the gaps are, but haven't had a response.
>
> Tonga is still in Covid border closure mode, which means that few people
> are able to travel back and forth. One person that has been able to travel
> there is Shane Cronin, our volcanologist whom I was talking to, and he has
> been out of quarantine and is doing some interesting work up there - he
> even made the front page of the BBC World Service the other week:
> https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61071293
>
> First reports we've had from him suggest that there was still quite a bit
> of action after the international cable was knocked out. He's quite
> familiar with Hunga and was able to pinpoint which earlier eruptions
> various of the bits that were left had come from. He's been trying to get a
> record of vessels in the area at the time to get ash reports from
> BigOceanData and they promised to help. Alas, this coincided with a sudden
> surge in demand for superyacht tracking, which presumably has kept them
> busy, so we've not seen this data set yet. What we do know is that tsunami
> run-up on Tongatapu's West Coast was about 15 metres - far bigger than the
> waves whose videos still made it across the cable. Shane has also been able
> to look at some of the tsunami deposits and this is likely to yield some
> further insights.
>
> Meanwhile, Emily Lane from NIWA has done some modelling around the
> pyroclastic density currents (turbidity currents of volcanic origin) that
> could have come off Hunga. The amount of material displacement involved in
> these simulations is in the several cubic kilometres! These show those
> flows actually reaching both cable grounds, the domestic one first. The
> domestic cable was essentially at the bottom of a trench straight downhill
> from Hunga and never stood a chance - not only do the simulations show the
> flow going across the trench eastbound, but then reflecting off the
> opposite side back into the trench before flowing out of the trench like
> water in a gutter. No wonder they couldn't find anything! The international
> cable grounds would have been reached later, first on the western side
> where they found the murky water weeks later, and then also on the eastern
> side, where the cable was pushed north. That said, according to the
> simulations, the first flow reaching the eastern side would have gotten
> there well before the outage, and doesn't quite explain the 5 km
> displacement. That said, the simulation was only run until international
> cable outage time, and there's some question as to the validity of these
> results generally as nobody knows whether the bathymetry in the area was
> still anywhere near what it used to be. NIWA and others are sending ships
> up to get clarity as to how the seafloor topography has changed in the
> area. Hunga used to have a huge caldera, and at this point, nobody knows
> whether it's still there, has subsided, or got blasted away. Lots of
> interesting science happening there at the moment.
>
> On 20/04/2022 12:06 am, Dave Taht wrote:
>
> On Tue, Apr 19, 2022 at 4:57 AM Mike Puchol <mike@starlink.sx>
> <mike@starlink.sx> wrote:
> >
> > Apologies for resurrecting an old thread, but I had totally missed this
> post:
> >
> >
> http://www.fintel.com.fj/pages.cfm/company/news/spacex-starlink-gateway--fintel.html
> >
> > It seems the gateway was setup in Fintel’s existing earth station, four
> antennas only, however, and the cables in surface ducts.
>
> No apologies needed, in fact, does anyone know how well tonga is
> recovering?
>
> > Best,
> >
> > Mike
> > On Feb 25, 2022, 20:12 +0300, Ulrich Speidel <u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz>
> <u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz>, wrote:
> >
> > I've heard nothing further about teleport establishment in Fiji, but
> that doesn't mean that nothing has happened.
> >
> > Meanwhile, cable repair has progressed a good bit. The damage was far
> greater than originally envisaged. On the international cable, faults
> (complete cable ruptures and fibre damage) stretched over more than 80 km.
> The cable ran entirely SOUTH of the Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha'apai volcano
> (about 60 km away and shielded by a number of submarine mounts for at least
> parts of the damaged section). Yet the Reliance cable ship traced one
> disconnected cable piece end to about 5 km NORTH of its nominal route,
> found various sections had disappeared completely, and recovered sections
> of up to 9 km at a time from the seabed.
> >
> > A bog standard cable break requires two holding drives (or drags), HD
> for short, to pick up each of the cable endpoints from the seafloor. It
> also requires either an ROV dive to check if the cable has completely
> separated at the fault position, or a cut if the cable is still held
> together by the steel. That cut can be done either by ROV as well, or if
> visibility doesn't permit ROV use, by a cutting drive (CD). Any HD or CD
> requires the cable ship to tow a seafloor grapnel / cutter device
> transversally across the cable, so they're easy to spot on position traces.
> The Reliance did no fewer than seven HD's in its eastern operations area
> near Tongatapu, where it worked first. Visibility there was good (so ROV
> could be used), but damage substantial.
> >
> > The ship then proceeded to the western end of the fault zone where
> reflectometer measurements from the Suva end had found a fault. Because of
> bad visibility, they did a CD followed by 2 HD's there, then noticed that
> there was fibre damage along the cable to Suva, so reeled that in and cut
> the damaged bit out.
> >
> > They then proceeded to put a "mini-system" together. Let me explain:
> Enroute to Tonga, the Reliance stopped at Subcom's depot in Apia (Samoa) to
> load whatever cable they had in store there. This included spares not only
> for the Fiji-Tonga cable but also for various other cable systems in the
> wider region. Reliance left Apia with about 80 km of cable in total. The
> amount of cable that will need to be re-laid along the damaged
> international section is 90 km (you need to allow for a bit of cable
> lengthening due to slack being inserted when cable ends are being brought
> up from 2000 m (6000 ft) or so below). This means that the Reliance is
> re-using some of the cable recovered from the damaged section, and the
> whole "mini-system" will be one long stitch job. The damaged section also
> included a repeater worth US$230k, which they were trying to recover and
> which was still missing as of this morning - I've yet to hear from my
> contact as to whether they were successful on the last recovery attempt
> today (they've left the area after three drives and are heading West right
> now. The rest of the mini-system was going to be laid after the repeater
> recovery attempt (the overall success doesn't depend on the repeater being
> found, but the final repair bill does). I thus expect the cable repair to
> be completed in the next few days.
> >
> > The domestic cable is another story altogether, unfortunately. This has
> a blind stretch of 77 km at present, as measured by optical reflectometer
> from Tongatapu and Ha'apai (there was meant to be a measurement from Vava'u
> yesterday but I haven't heard yet what this revealed, the cable from
> Tongatapu has two fibre pairs, one of which heads to each destination from
> a branching unit west of Ha'apai. That said, once the international cable
> has been fixed, the Reliance won't have enough cable left to complete the
> domestic job, even if some cable bits could be recovered there. The next
> available stock of suitable cable is in Europe, around 35-40 days one-way
> shipping away. They intend to bridge this time gap via satellite (and I'm
> sure would welcome a Starlink delegation with a teleport to connect to the
> international cable, too, especially now that the Australian Navy gave them
> Omicron along with their aid deliveries).
> >
> > I've been in close contact with our volcanology / geophysics community
> here in NZ, who know the area well. The story of damage to the
> international cable is now shaping up to be a pretty complex one. What we
> know thus far is that it was neither the volcano's initial blast nor the
> subsequent tsunami that killed the cable - the outage began only well after
> the tsunami had hit. In all probability, it's been a combination of
> submarine landslides and turbidite waves from a variety of sources that hit
> hours and possibly many days after the eruption. Finding that a cable piece
> has moved 5 km TOWARDS the volcano points at an event south of the cable
> route, and the mix of seafloor visibilities encountered by the Reliance
> points at there having multiple events from multiple sources. There have
> been plenty of quakes upwards of M4 and even an M6.2 in the wider area that
> could have triggered slopes, especially with an extra layer of ash on them.
> Turbidite waves can travel up to 1000 km, aren't anywhere near as fast as a
> tsunami, and have long been known to have damaged cables in the past (see
> B.C. Heezen and M. Ewing, Turbidity currents and submarine slumps, and the
> 1929 Grand Banks Earthquake, American Journal of Science, v. 250, pp
> 849-873, December 1952. This quake killed 12 submarine cables over more
> than 18 hours).
> >
> > Meanwhile, there's still limited satellite service in and out of Tonga,
> but I can confirm that e-mails (even with attachments) make it in and out
> OK.
> >
> > On 18/02/2022 8:27 pm, Mike Puchol wrote:
> >
> > Hi Daniel,
> >
> > I added it after there was a confirmation on Twitter that SpaceX people
> were on the ground to set one up, and also, as two /27 blocks (IPv4) have
> been assigned to Fiji’s capital, under the Sydney POP, and they can be
> pinged.
> >
> > Wether it’s at the teleport or not, unsure, but for simulation, an error
> of even a few km doesn’t really matter.
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > Mike
> > On Feb 18, 2022, 06:04 +0100, Daniel AJ Sokolov <daniel@falco.ca>
> <daniel@falco.ca>, wrote:
> >
> > On 2022-02-07 at 15:29, Mike Puchol wrote:
> >
> > As far as placing a gateway in Fiji, it already has a teleport
> > facility, which will have power and fibre (unless that one has been
> > taken out too?). Checkhttps://goo.gl/maps/6BYXf4R17yys7zNe9
> >
> >
> > Hey Mike, you put a "SUVA (Emergency)" ground station on starlink.sx.
> >
> > Is that for simulation, or has Starlink actually installed a ground
> > station in Fidschi by now? Would you have positive confirmation?
> >
> > Thank you
> > Daniel
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> >
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> >
> > --
> > ****************************************************************
> > Dr. Ulrich Speidel
> >
> > School of Computer Science
> >
> > Room 303S.594 (City Campus)
> >
> > The University of Auckland
> > u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz
> > http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
> > ****************************************************************
> >
> >
> >
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>
> --
> I tried to build a better future, a few times:
> https://wayforward.archive.org/?site=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.icei.org
>
> Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC
>
> --
> ****************************************************************
> Dr. Ulrich Speidel
>
> School of Computer Science
>
> Room 303S.594 (City Campus)
>
> The University of Aucklandu.speidel@auckland.ac.nz http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
> ****************************************************************
>
>
>
>
> --
> ****************************************************************
> Dr. Ulrich Speidel
>
> School of Computer Science
>
> Room 303S.594 (City Campus)
>
> The University of Aucklandu.speidel@auckland.ac.nz http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
> ****************************************************************
>
>
>
>
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