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Google’s Equiano Cable Will Extend to the Remote Island of Saint Helena
- jonbaer 7y agohttps://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/introducing-equiano-a-subsea-cable-from-portugal-to-south-africa https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/introd...
- reaperducer 7y agoI'm of mixed feelings about this. Yes, it's great for the people of Saint Helena. But it would be nice if we could have a few remote places on Earth stay remote. AT&T is lobbying the federal government for permission to put cell towers in Death Valley. Death Valley is fine without them. It doesn't need more tourist conveniences. It has"Death" in its name for a reason. On the other hand, if this is something the people of Saint Helena voted for and approved, then it's up to them. I just hope it wasn't pushed on them by a bureaucrat.
- BubRoss 7y agoDo you live on Saint Helena or in Death Valley?
- paulsutter 7y agoSpaceX and Amazon will provide global low latency internet pretty much everywhere. But don’t worry, each customer will vote with their wallet by buying it (or not)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- grandmczeb 7y agoI would be surprised if even half of earth’s landmass has cell coverage. There will be plenty of remote places for the forceable future.
- pridkett 7y agoIt was remarkable how at peace I felt when I took a liveaboard to Darwin and Wolf islands in Galapagos. Yes, there was an emergency satellite phone as total backup, but it was great knowing that there was generally no way to contact me. Didn’t feel nearly as strange as I thought it would.
- sb057 7y agoGiven that they have an international airport (albiet with horrific underutilization) I think the remoteness ship sailed long ago.
- mc32 7y agoDoesn’t it by its nature _have_ to be an international airport? It’s about the same size as the city of San Francisco. It’s not going to be regional so people can fly from seven miles east back to seven miles west.
- BurningFrog 7y agoAs a British territory, I suppose they could have a domestic airport flying to London, Gibraltar and Port Stanley :)
- ajdlinux 7y agoFlights to/from overseas territories with separate immigration laws are typically considered "international" anyway, so even in that case they would still effectively have an international airport.
- KC8ZKF 7y agoHow did San Francisco get the internet? Was it voted on and approved or was it pushed on it by some bureaucrat?
- flattone 7y agomissing the point though...remote places staying remote.
- kspacewalk 7y agoIs that a universally agreed-upon goal?
- quickthrower2 7y agoIt is for people living in SF craving a zen holiday.
- inflatableDodo 7y agoI think they may be doing zen holidays wrong. You don't even have to get out of bed to have a zen holiday.
- flattone 7y agosince when is universally agreed upon: 1: ever/any single instance above nuclear household, a thing 2: demonstrate why it even makes sense to ask that? 3: what in the f/h is happening here. am i on reddit? i literally screenshot this and a later discussion for off hn topic on "what is happening at HN" 4: hostile HN takeover via brain vomit commenting?
- flattone 7y agoBVC = flippant curiosities/no sharp info no sharp opinions, just attitudes. get out.
- todd3834 7y agoSometimes you have to drive through Death Valley to get to other places and cell reception is kind of important in a place like that. Imagine having a baby in your car, it breaks down with no cell reception and it's 130F temperatures outside
- dima55 7y agoIf this is of concern to you, don't take your baby there when it's 130F outside
- todd3834 7y agoYeah that’s one way to deal with it. Another is if there is cell reception then it’s not such a big deal because you can call someone if it happens. Definitely two possible solutions.
- ethbro 7y agoThen I guess my last thought would be "Gee, it was pretty dumb to drive through Death Valley with no spares, supplies, or an emergency beacon."
- streblo 7y agoSo when people inevitably do it, they should just die?
- mirimir 7y agoIt's a tough question. Nobody "should" die. But maybe improving cellular coverage in Death Valley would actually increase fatalities. Because it'd feel safer. Or at least, it'd probably increase rescue costs. And there are arguably better uses for resources than trying to make Death Valley a safe vacation venue.
- hnaccy 7y agoYes.
- 7y ago
- chrissnell 7y agoYou don't have to go to Saint Helena for radio silience; you can find this in the Owyhee Desert of southern Idaho/northern Nevada/eastern Idaho. There are thousands of square miles out there with no service. It's glorious. My trip there in 2015: https://www.flickr.com/photos/defender90/albums/72157654387670633 https://www.flickr.com/photos/defender90/albums/721576543876...
- killjoywashere 7y agoI'm willing to bet Google puts a Loon groundstation on that island. They've been moving south from Puerto Rico to Peru and Kenya. This is in between.
- techntoke 7y agoWhat about LEO broadband? I mean, I get that space junk is an issue too but it seems better to invest in global Internet via satellite.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoYou can never have enough connectivity.
- tacticus 7y agoShared spectrum, low power transmitters, high latency and limited max bandwidth. It's going to be "fun" for anyone who depends on something in orbit
- rorykoehler 7y agoMy understanding is that Leo has similar latency to cables?
- tacticus 7y agolol no. You still have to go up, over, down, across wire, back up, over and down again you're going to be paying a 25 to 50 ms latency on everything and that depends on having the dish tracking stuff working perfectly. (it is vastly better than the GEO stuff i've had to use in the past. but a replacement for fibre in general use. nope.) oh and weather is still going to poop on your signal
- PopeDotNinja 7y agoSomeone smarter than I made this, which you may or may not agree with... "Why SpaceX is Making Starlink" https://youtu.be/giQ8xEWjnBs https://youtu.be/giQ8xEWjnBs TL;DR -- satellites can be faster than cables in certain cases
- tacticus 7y agoBut not wider and not reliably so. Also marketing videos are always going to show best theoretical case. They are not going to show a cloudy day in a high contention network in a region not favoured by the orbit gods.
- daxterspeed 7y agoThis looks like an incredibly forward thinking move. Connecting South America to Africa will provide the opportunity for a wast array of new inter-continental online businesses, focused on countries that today aren't seen as "online hubs".
- ryanmarsh 7y ago"space-division multiplexing" LOL, you mean "stringing another wire/fiber". I think we used to call this "bonding".
- adrianmonk 7y agoI'm not a hardware engineer or anything, but apparently it's a little more innovative than that. From Google's page (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/a-quick-hop-across-the-pond-supercharging-the-dunant-subsea-cable-with-sdm-technology https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/a-quic...) about the previous cable which uses it: > Traditional subsea cables are powered from the shore end and rely on a dedicated set of pump lasers to amplify the optical signal for each fiber pair as data traverses the length of the cable. Now, SDM technology allows pump lasers and associated optical components to be shared among multiple fiber pairs, while still working within the unique power constraints of the ocean floor. I don't profess to understand laser pumping, but it sounds like they found a way for multiple fiber pairs to share expensive and/or power-hungry active components. So it is stringing another fiber, but in layman's terms maybe kind of like network bonding by figuring out a trick to plug two ethernet cables into one port.
- KaiserPro 7y agonot quite. http://modegap.eu/?publication=space-division-multiplexing&wppa_open=yes http://modegap.eu/?publication=space-division-multiplexing&w... (PDF) Its a way of making QAM16 less crosstalky (well thats my reasoning. )
- BurningFrog 7y agoIf you read the article, the Equiano cable is actually only connecting South Africa, Nigeria and Portugal, aside from Saint Helena. The "SAEx" cable that's drawn into the map "failed to secure funding"...
- walrus01 7y agoBased on recent experience in West Africa, it is rapidly looking like the internet traffic exchange and interconnection points for ISPs/mobile phone carriers/telecoms in that region is coalescing into two cities: Lagos, Nigeria Accra, Ghana Both have the advantage of being on the ocean (where cable landing stations are built), major population centres, major business centres, and IT/networking/telecom education and training programs are run in the English language. If you are a mid sized ISP in Accra it is still quite costly to buy transport circuits going "both directions" - to get a 10 or 100GbE circuit from Accra to Cape Town, to peer with ISPs and content sources there, and also to buy a 10 or 100GbE circuit from Accra to western europe (Paris, London) to meet major IXes there. From what I've seen looking at BGP topology for a lot of these ISPs, Accra is sort of a suburb of London.
- raxxorrax 7y agoI would immigrate to an island in the middle of nowhere in a heartbeat. But only if it had a reliable internet connection. Sad state of affairs really, because the costs are probably insurmountable for the islands inhabitants. I believe they are glad if they manage to maintain an airport. Satellite based net access isn't my favorite, but probably the more realistic option.
- sunstone 7y agoNice place to hang out in the Western European time zone.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- walrus01 7y agoThere are still a LOT of islands on earth that don't have submarine fiber connectivity. Disclaimer: I work in two-way satellite telecom. Until the advent of o3b, these were pretty much entirely dependent on various methods of connecting to the outside world via commercial geostationary transponder kHz leases, in the C and Ku bands. Works fine, but minimum 492ms latency return trip, and very expensive in monthly recurring cost per Mbps. o3b has helped a great deal, in terms of monthly $/Mbps and latency. Further medium earth orbit and low earth orbit things (starlink, oneweb, amazon's kuiper) will help even more. Due to the high cost of submarine cable construction, unless places happen to be roughly along the route that the cable would be taking anyways (as St. Helena is), there will remain a lot of places where 100% of the WAN link to the outside world will be some combination of LEO/MEO/GEO satellite access. "Modern" satellite modems that are capable of advanced computation for low density parity codes and advanced FEC methods, plus adaptive coding and modulation to deal with Ku and Ka band rain fade, those certainly help a lot. It still costs a ridiculous amount to build and launch a 3000 to 6500 kilogram sized satellite into geostationary orbit. I am cautiously optimistic that SpaceX's lower launch costs due to reusable rockets will help with this. Full deployment of the LEO starlink constellation economically seems to be predicated upon the use of a cargo-carrying reusable version of the Starship, which would be able to place many hundreds of satellites in one launch.
- provolone 7y agoMaybe they can become a casino hosting jurisdiction?
- thinkloop 7y agoTheir options are almost no internet or all the internet.
- madaxe_again 7y agoForgive me if I’m missing something obvious, but who is financing this? Google? DfID have ruled out funding, and it’s unlikely St H will get any further EU regional funding. So - either they’re going to be taking an almighty loan, or rely on the kindness of corporations. I can’t see St H becoming a tech hub. It’s a lovely place, sure, but they’d need immigration of people with technical skills for that - I can count on one hand the number of saints with computer literacy, and they don’t want/can’t support any kind of immigrant population. Apart from anything else, all houses are occupied, and there’s precious little land upon which to build in Jamestown, and the saints do not want high rises and all the rest. No, I don’t speak for them, but I have spoken with them, and it’s pretty clear which way the wind blows. I hope they do get a better connection to the world, but I fear practicality will get in the way. If they do plough ahead and assume the debt (I am assuming that there will be a debt to google), then the rumblings in Whitehall of making crown dependencies responsible for their own budgets might get louder. Their airport (which is perfectly fine, by the by, stunning approach) continues to attract flack as an ill conceived and expensive boondoggle.
- danellis 7y agoYou're right that there's no native tech talent in a tiny population like that, but who says they don't want any kind of immigrant population? Presumably it doesn't take thousands of people to keep an Earth station running after it's built. I mean, look at less-populated Ascension Island with its BBC relay station.
- madaxe_again 7y agoOh, indeed - it will take but a handful of people to manage, as the C&W dish currently does. But therein lies the problem. It’s unclear what the economic uplift would be, and how it would pay for itself. If it’s simply a convenient waystation for the cable, great, but it doesn’t seem to be, so to me, the reasoning is unclear.
- walrus01 7y agoYou might be surprised how much is being paid in transponder kHz lease monthly recurring costs, and earth station services on the other end, to provide internet and WAN phone services for the entire population of St Helena. Using submarine fiber might have an ROI under 15 years, if the additional cost to bring the cable to the island (vs bypass it entirely with same cable) is slightly government subsidized.
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