So how much copper is there in fiber-optic cables?

And wouldn't someone notice a boat big enough to retrieve 11km of undersea cable buried 1-2m under the seabed.

I'm somewhat more concerned about this nonsensical sentence:

"The same officials came up with the latest cable theft price tag Tuesday and resolved to..."

Regarding The Register's recent foray into questioning .co.uk and .com domains, it's interesting that the phrase "the latest cable theft price tag Tuesday" appears. I don't know what a "price tag Tuesday" is or why it should be stolen. Perhaps authorities came up with the latesst cable theft price tag ON Tuesday?

No Americani_ation of my Register, please!

I think its strange how Vietnam is missing 11Km of cable and all of a sudden IBM puts out a load of adverts with big balls made of used cable. Can anyone else see the connection there (no pun intended)?

Well said Jason,

Vultures may leave their Nike's, Coke and McDonalds at the door. Thank you!

I personally, don't care whether El Reg adopts .com rather than .co.uk, as long as the quality of my favourite geek website stays the same. I do read arstechnica as well, however, it is El Reg that is the number one site for Tech news IMHO.

It said "copper hungry," not "copper fed." I expect a bundle of fibre looks enough like a bundle of copper (to someone hoping to sell it on at a dollar per kilo) while it's still underwater. By the time you can see the difference, it's too late.

It sounds like the ancient plot twist where the robbers, after months of planning, find out the vault is filled with land-transfer records.

...nice to see the IBM 'ball of cables' ad on the comments page for this story.

Perhaps that's where the cable ended up?!

Makes me think of those wasters who steal man-hole covers to sell for scrap, or the utter scum who I found swarming over my skip a few weeks ago, loading up a supermarket trolley with scraps of metal.

Fishermen made off with a "560Mb/s" cable leaving the country dependant on a single 10 Gb/sec cable...

OK, they have lost redundency, but they have only lost 5% of their bandwidth... Probably about time that it was upgraded... unless it was 560 gbit, then they only have 5% left...

Remember, that underwater, all cable looks alike... They probably realised somthing was wrong when they pulled an Alcatel underwater repeater unit up at the same time...

Yes, there is copper in a fibre optic cable: it gives the cable more rigidity, and there are cables that are used to power the repeater stations (laser pumps & cable / link diagnostics) every couple of dozen klicks that are used to boost the signal and report what segment of a x thousand kilometer line has just been broken after earthquakes, sunken/beached ships and thieving fishermen break it. It is also used to reinforce the cable when a cable maintenance ship has to drag a hook over the seabed to pull the cable up to make repairs - some of those lines are miles deep, and that makes a lot of cable to pull...

Cheers,

Duncan

Under what circumstances should the apostrophe s be used? Hmm? Plural? Bzzt, wrong. Logs, eyes, motes etc etc.

.... we are all so much richer for your comment.

I assume that you are testing us by not having a period after "etc", since you appear to be using abbreviation of the Latin words "et cetera".

This would translate your sentence to read along the lines of: "Logs, eyes, motes and other things and other things"

I am, however, at a loss to understand why you are missing a comma after motes and the first "etc". I will however refrain from sarcasm and pointing our you obvious lack of command of basic grammar.

I would like to point out that there are three general cases where there can be confusion in when to use an apostrophe: wankers indicating a number of wankers has no apostrophe, wanker's as in ownership of an item by a single wanker has the apostrophe placed before the "s" and wankers' indicating a group of wankers places the apostrophe after the "s"..

"Under what circumstances should the apostrophe s be used?" Could possibly be written to "Under what circumstances should the apostrophe be used in conjunction with s?" but that is probably a matter of taste.

Good reference to logs and eyes - very Freudian.

Duncan and Colin, if it's possessive then maybe it should be McDonald's

The eyes's have it?

people recycling from skips can only be a good thing. not only does your waste get reused, you get more space to fill.

"pointing our you obvious lack"...

"I will however refrain from sarcasm and pointing our you obvious lack of command of basic grammar."

Then I shall do the same for your speeling.

of starting a small flame war, I would be grateful if you would point out any speeling mistakes.

Regards.

btw - yes it probably was a over reaction to your post but I didn't think Duncan deserved your comment.

"...pointing our you obvious ..."

I beleeve thats whaat wee wuz talkin bout.

"Wankers" so totally applies on this forum.

There were 1500 tons of cable confiscated. That would be 3 million pounds or roughly 1.4 million kilos. At the quoted price of $13,000 per kilo to lay the cable, that would represent over 18 billion dollars. That is roughly 3,000 times more than the $5.84m they claim the damage will cost to fix. Did they decide to go with the low bidder the second time around?

I too am happy when people take stuff out of my skip - after all I put unwanted rubbish into the skip..and if they empty it before its collected then i can put more rubbish in!

why do you feel aggreived by their action? You've only had taken what you'd thrown away. heck , you could have given them the stuff for free and not paid for a skip in the first place......

its like old IT kit. we are very happy for folk to come and collect the old PCs and monitors we are getting rid of (HDs are all wiped very clean, serial numbers, licence keys stickers etc removed) as, with WEE regulations etc it costs us money to get rid of the stuff. at least 50 quid per unit. if someone wants a free 17" CRT with a PII 512MB and 60Gb HD system..then fine. we cant sell it. we cant even ebay it.