Cable modems and digital subscriber lines promise customers high-speed connections to the Internet. What isn’t so swift in many regions of the country, however, is the hookup by cable and telephone companies.
But the frustration some customers experience in trying to get a high-speed connection pales in comparison with that faced by about 130 scientists and support staff members at the National Science Foundation’s research station at the South Pole. Right now these researchers deep in Antarctica’s interior have only a sporadic link to the outside world through what is, in effect, a living museum of obsolete and abandoned satellites.
Given that some of those satellites are now more than a quarter-century old, the Office of Polar Projects at the science foundation is looking at new ways of linking the Admundsen-Scott South Pole Station electronically to the rest of the world.
The prime contender at the moment seems an unlikely choice: cable. Through its contractor, Raytheon Polar Services, the science foundation is looking into the feasibility of installing a fiber-optic cable across a continent that is marked by glaciers, deep crevasses and towering mountains and is notorious for having some of the world’s most extreme cold and winds.
“We want to make sure that potential vendors know this is not like laying cable across the United States,” said Andre Roy, Raytheon’s project manager.
For many people, the major attraction of the South Pole might be its potential as a refuge from modern communications. But Patrick D. Smith, the manager of technology development in the Polar Research Support Section of the science foundation, said that many of the scientists who visit the station to study glaciology, geophysics, meteorology, upper atmosphere physics, astronomy and astrophysics need to feed information to others.
More reliable communications could allow some scientists to run their Antarctic projects from their laboratories back home, he added, reducing the environmental stress on the South Pole.
It seems that even scientists exploring the South Pole are no longer allowed to be out of touch for too long.
“The grantees have other lives outside of their field trip to the Antarctic for three months,” Smith said. “There are a lot of constraints. If you’re a tenured prof with grad students, it’s kind of hard to be completely absent.”
The station now relies on four satellites that in their old age have shifted into rakish orbits. As a result, they provide communications to the South Pole for 12 to 16 hours a day, depending on the combined patterns of the orbits. The satellites’ relative antiquity means that some of them offer Web links at a speed of only 38.3 kilobits per second, below that of a typical dial-up modem.
Iridium considered
Gradually, of course, these satellites will stop working. As a stopgap, Raytheon and the science foundation may turn to outer space’s biggest financial fiasco, the Iridium global satellite phone system. Iridium’s phone service doesn’t offer enough bandwidth to support the station’s needs, but it may be possible to adapt the system’s internal communications network to also provide a high-speed wireless Internet connection to the South Pole.
A partnership acquired Iridium two years ago in a bankruptcy reorganization. It is not building any more satellites and does not expect the system to last much beyond 2010.
Unlike the South Pole station, some bases in Antarctica are far enough north to be in regular contact with normal communications satellites, Smith said. That prompted Raytheon to consider ways of connecting the South Pole station with the U.S. coastal station at McMurdo Sound or a joint French-Italian station that is just far enough north of the pole to maintain constant satellite contact.
Microwave relay towers, Smith said, are not an option. Microwave does have some advantages: unlike the radio frequencies used by broadcasters, for instance, microwave transmissions are not disturbed by the ionosphere at the South Pole. But the relay stations require large amounts of electricity that can be provided only by diesel generators. Not only did that raise environmental concerns, since a link would involve about a dozen stations, but it would also be virtually impossible to visit towers that have mechanical or electrical problems during the long winter, Smith said.
Fiber-optic link
After that, the group turned its attention to building a fiber-optic link–an idea, Smith acknowledged, that “sounds kind of far-fetched.”
One of the few good things about any Antarctic cable network, Roy said, “is that you don’t have to bury the cable; it will bury itself.”
But the good news stops there. Because a link to McMurdo would be about 850 miles long, the digital pulses of light passing through it would need to be amplified at regular intervals. But that, again, would require electricity, which is unavailable.
The fiber-optic cables that are laid on ocean floors would seem to offer many answers to the South Pole’s problem. Besides carrying electricity for their amplifiers, they are armored for protection. The trouble, Smith said, is that those added features make undersea fiber-optic cables extremely heavy. That is not a problem for a huge cable-laying ship. But building an Antarctic network would most likely involve hauling the cable over ice-covered peaks as high as 13,000 feet.
The science foundation is now asking fiber network suppliers to submit ideas about the feasibility of bringing fiber to the South Pole. Roy said that the collapse of the telecom equipment market had generated considerable interest within the industry, whatever the problems.
If the science foundation decides that a fiber link can be established, Roy expects that any network will be built by a consortium of companies using both custom-made fiber equipment and special cable-laying machinery. “I don’t think you can go out and buy a piece of equipment to do this,” he said.
