[Kictanet] Re: Fiber - Why not Over the land?

[Bill Woodcock]

    > I was chatting with a colleague of mine about the EASSy cable.  And 
    > he was asking, if our intention is to connect with the SAT3 cable at 
    > S.Africa why cant we do it over the terrestial landscape.  I am told 
    > fiber laid side-by-side with Electricity cables can be installed in 
    > record time with minimal costs...
    > Must we bury the fiber in the Ocean for it to work (;-).

There are three ways, practically speaking, of doing it over land: you can 
bury it in conduit, you can wrap it around power lines, or you can put it 
through existing pipelines.

Burying it in its own conduit achieves no great cost synergy, and provides 
no great protection.  Wrapping it around existing high-voltage power lines 
is very fast, very cheap, gets the fiber up where people don't want to 
touch it, and is only medium-difficult to repair.  But you typically don't 
have high-voltage power lines everywhere you want to run fiber. Pushing it 
through existing gas or oil or water pipelines provides good protection, 
is medium fast and cheap, but the pipelines are even rarer than power 
lines, and it's very difficult to add taps after the fact, and so on.

In all cases, over-land is cheaper and less equipment-intensive than a 
real deep-water submarine fiber lay.

Disadvantages to running over-land relative to submarine are that the 
fiber is much more likely to be damaged accidentally or through vandalism, 
and that it's much more difficult to achieve consensus among all of the 
(many many) parties across whose land it needs to run (particularly since 
the vast majority of them will receive no direct benefit from it, since it 
won't be exposed everywhere).

                                -Bill