16 ms·

The Dunant subsea cable

262 points by johannesboyne 6y ago

aynyc 6y ago
I know nothing of this type of engineering. How do you even start a project like this? Map the bottom of the ocean, figure out all the danger zones? What is the cost of doing something like this?
- chokeartist 6y ago
  In nutshell you got it. The cost is basically just bend over and smile (not trying to be glib... it is HUGE).
- tyingq 6y ago
  "What is the cost of doing something like this?" Their Oregon to Japan cable, 9000km and laid in 2016, cost $300M. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2939316/googles-60tbps-pacific-cable-welcomed-in-japan.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2939316/googles-60tbps...
  - sparsely 6y ago
    That is at least 1 order of magnitude cheaper than I would have guessed. Mind boggling that it's cheaper to do that then buy like the 4th best meal delivery app in Canada or whatever.
    - frabert 6y ago
      Yeah that's what I was thinking too. It doesn't sound like money well spent, it sounds like a bargain to me, like "you'd be stupid not to do it" cheap for something the size of Google.
    - Mauricebranagh 6y ago
      That's is what I thought, years ago back when I worked for a big telco we actually had a small fleet of our own cable laying ships. The fun thing was the company hand book had a whole other section of T&C allowances etc if you worked on a ship.
      - bryyyon 6y ago
        Interesting! Would you be able to give us a few examples that'd be in the ship-specific section? I'm curious on what sorts of things would be permissible/acceptable/expected in a ship work environment but not necessarily called out off-ship. Perhaps safety and emergency procedure information?
    - Cerium 6y ago
      Indeed, California spent 20 times as much for a 3.5km bridge.
    - tzs 6y ago
      It's probably cheaper than people would expect because the long run across the deep ocean is a lot more straightforward than most people would expect. 1. For the deep ocean parts of the route, cables and associated equipment (such as repeaters) are simply spooled out from the back of the cable laying ship, to settle on the ocean floor. 2. For shallow waters, the cable is buried. This is done by dragging a plow along the bottom which cuts a furrow and puts the cable into it. The plow has an altitude control and a camera so that an operator on the ship can control it, and a magnetometer to check if the cable is properly buried behind it. 3. For areas where burying isn't practical but they anticipate ships will anchor, they use armored cable. For #1, the costs are going to be the cost to operate the ship while it slowly spools out the cable and the cost of the cable. For #3, same thing, but with more expensive cable. For #2 I'd expect it is similar, except the ship goes a lot slower (about 0.5 knots when using the plow, compared to about 5 knots when laying surface cable). Finally, there is this. #4. At the shores, they need to avoid damaging reefs and other habitats, not wreck the beach, and things like that. The cable needs to be in conduits that are buried or anchored. And building those conduits needs to be done in a way that does not mess up the environment. So what you've got then for a long cable project is two ends that present underwater construction projects, the shallow waters near the two ends where you have to bury the cable, and then the long deep ocean stretch where you are just spooling the cable out. This suggests the costs are going to have a component that doesn't really depend on how long the thing is (the two ends and the shallow waters near the ends where burial is needed) and a component that is proportional to length (the long run between the two shallow waters near the ends). At 5 knots, it would take about 1000 hours to lay the deep sea part of the cable. If the ship costs $50k/hour to operate, that would be about $40 million. (I have no idea what it costs to operate these ships, but Google tells me that big cruise ships cost about that much to operate, and I'd guess that a cable laying ship is cheaper). Assuming the underwater cable itself is 10 times as expensive as regular cable, its about $150 million for 9000 km. That's brings us to about $200 million for the deep ocean part.
      - eitland 6y ago
        > Assuming the underwater cable itself is 10 times as expensive as regular cable, its about $150 million for 9000 km. Still sounds really inexpensive when I consider it contains a large number of repeaters and is meant to stay at the bottom of the ocean. Edit: Forgot to write, I haven't run the numbers myself but I enjoyed your reasoning here, you put a smile on my face : > At 5 knots, it would take about 1000 hours to lay the deep sea part of the cable. If the ship costs $50k/hour to operate, that would be about $40 million. (I have no idea what it costs to operate these ships, but Google tells me that big cruise ships cost about that much to operate, and I'd guess that a cable laying ship is cheaper).
  - voidmain0001 6y ago
    That sounds like money well spent, and a good deal considering what it enables. It would be incredible to see the multiple levels of govt around the world collaborate to create a publicly funded (bond sales) project for laying fibre optic across the planet which could not be sold to a private corp, and that guaranteed access to it based on population proportion, not GDP.
- syoc 6y ago
  I have no idea about how this stuff, but this wired article from 1996 written by Neal Stephenson about undersea cables is a fantastic read. https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
  - tclancy 6y ago
    Came here to recommend the same. I reread it every 5 years or so for inspiration.
  - MarkusWandel 6y ago
    The article is now almost a quarter century old and the cables have gotten better. In fact, even that cable probably got a lot faster after optical coherent detection was introduced, i.e. much more capable modems. But the way the cables are actually laid and especially the details of the shore landings and the issues of terrestrial runs, are as current as ever.
- jesuschroist 6y ago
  While not being super technical, there is an interesting miniature "The First Word Across the Ocean" in the "Decisive Moments in History" book by Stefan Zweig. It tells the story and circumstances of how the first trans-atlantic cable (back then for telegraphs) was laid in the late 19th century.
- Schalter 6y ago
  The funny thing is, that when you realise that they just lay it down on the sea floor and you start to think through all the potential issues with throwing a very thick special cable on the ocean, you will realize that it already just works as it is for a while.
- virtuallynathan 6y ago
  Pretty much, you do surveys, probably based on existing ocean floor sonography, and then contact out a cable to someone like NEC, TE SubCom, Huawei, etc… Load it up on a cable laying vessel, and use software like Makai Lay to optimally place the cable on the ocean floor. [This is the basic idea, I wouldn’t treat this as an authoritative answer, I’m just loosely adjacent to this industry]
supernovae 6y ago
Is this why they're losing billions?
- jiveturkey 6y ago
  Your comment is both snide and wrong. lovely combination. I will respond anyway. They are losing billions because they are paying for growth. It is the proper strategy.
  - supernovae 6y ago
    only on hacker news could you get downvoted for asking legit questions and dumb answers by apologists... This is what happens when a marketing company starts a cloud right? turns it into a loss leader and everyone who buys it becomes and apologist at all cost. i don't get it.
    - jiveturkey 6y ago
      ah, indignant as well. GCP is not a loss leader. the unit economics are fine.
cmpb 6y ago
Ah the old "entire digitized Library of Congress" per second metric
- ThePadawan 6y ago
  I always find comparisons using text data incredibly worthless. I'm sure a Shakespeare play or The Great Gatsby are barely a few megabytes. But if you asked Joe Shmoe on the street "In Great Gatsbys, how big was the last picture your iPhone took", they would rightly have zero idea. It's so useless.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - bravura 6y ago
    Agreed, number of books stacked end to end to reach the moon is much more intuitive.
  - adverbly 6y ago
    Easy! It's just three olympic sized swimming pools worth of dollar bills stacked to the moon in bits.
  - edoceo 6y ago
    I think all of Shakespeare was like 450,000 LOC. I used to use that metric when folks ask why it took so long to debug. Like, our project is 600,000 LOC and more complicated than any of his works. He didn't have it all memorized and neither do I. It's a metric PMs can understand.
- ericpauley 6y ago
  I think this says more about the minuscule (on Google scale) ~10TB size of the digitized library of Congress.
sschueller 6y ago
Do those come with pre attached NSA listening devices [1] ? [1] https://siliconangle.com/2013/07/19/how-the-nsa-taps-undersea-fiber-optic-cables/ https://siliconangle.com/2013/07/19/how-the-nsa-taps-underse...
- gnu8 6y ago
  Most certainly. You don’t land a cable in either the US or France without a classified annex to the license that provides for interconnection to their intelligence services.
  - _Understated_ 6y ago
    Let's say they do tap the cables (I reckon they do too but in case they don't) what can they actually see if the traffic is encrypted?
    - ssijak 6y ago
      And at 250tb passing by every second
    - Keyframe 6y ago
      Considering they do intercept, as widely documented, question is how do they see if traffic is encrypted?
      - jagger27 6y ago
        Pretty trivial. If it looks like random noise, and doesn't have a compression header then it's probably encrypted.
    - eric-hu 6y ago
      I recall seeing a story in the past about how the NSA planted a misleadingly weak encryption library. https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2014/10/new_evidence_of_nsa_weakening.html https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2014/10/new_evidence_of... If the encryption used is flawed, they could see whatever they want.
SloopJon 6y ago
Wow, talk about a barrier to entry. Google already has Curie from North America to South America and Equiano from Portugal to South Africa. They're also working on Hopper from North America to UK and Spain: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/announcing-googles-grace-hopper-subsea-cable-system https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/announ... I presume that the other trillion-dollar companies are getting in on the action too.
- amit9gupta 6y ago
  Welcome to the new form of Colonialism!!
  - anonuser123456 6y ago
    Because Google owns the sea and no one else can lay cable...
onion2k 6y ago
You could load a modern Javascript-powered website in less than a minute with that.
- a012 6y ago
  My browser loads that page like forever, until I remember to _allow_ javascript on that page, like why on earth they render everything except the content at all.
  - LMYahooTFY 6y ago
    This is what I encounter more often than not lately. Is this due to more and more content simply generated by javascript frameworks?
    - speedgoose 6y ago
      Yes and because developers do not have time for the very few people who decided to disable javascript and not enable it when necessary.
  - c22 6y ago
    Yeah, it's one thing to build a page that wont render without Javascript, but making the only part that does render be a never-ending spinner is just rude.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  Don't worry, as hardware advances roll out, software bloat will always expand to fill the vacuum.
- throw0101a 6y ago
  Especially the linked blog post, as it doesn't render unless you allow JavaScript from gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com (per uMatrix). Webdevs: is there a reason why a page would be designed so that JS being on is mandatory? Especially for something as prosaic as a couple of paragraphs of text.
markphip 6y ago
I know there are many of these cables that have been around for years, but I am curious how are they physically secured? Especially where they transit from ocean to land? Is there some long underground/sea tunnel of conduit that the cable is routed through to the basement of some building? Or if you are walking along the beach somewhere is there just some cable running out of the ocean along the beach to some building near the shore? I also wonder what kind of permissions and licenses you need to seek to run a cable across the ocean floor?
- sandworm101 6y ago
  >> Or if you are walking along the beach somewhere is there just some cable running out of the ocean along the beach to some building near the shore? It is generally buried either under the sand or inside concrete. But yes, there are places where you can get very close to these things if you know what you are looking at. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_landing_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_landing_point Here is a pic of the landing for the US base in Cuba. https://www.dvidshub.net/news/186633/uct-1-unit-choice-gtmo-cable-landing https://www.dvidshub.net/news/186633/uct-1-unit-choice-gtmo-...
- chasd00 6y ago
  I’ve wondered the same, you can image search and find some pictures. They just sort of come out of the water and go up the beach (I guess what else would happen? Hah) https://media.wired.com/photos/59546c71be605811a2fdcfd0/191:100/pass/TumonBayCableLanding.jpg https://media.wired.com/photos/59546c71be605811a2fdcfd0/191:...
  - tyingq 6y ago
    Guessing this would be more typical: https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/.e/interactive/html5-video-media/2019/07/25/Transatlantic_cables_cross_section_gfx_large02.png https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/.e/interactive/html5-video-media/201...
- grandpa_yeti 6y ago
  You’re spot on. Most of the cables are either laid on the sea floor and up to a beach, or buried underneath beaches. The following link has some good background on what goes into laying cables and how they terminate. https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/25/asia/internet-undersea-cables-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/25/asia/internet-undersea-cables... As for physical security, there isn’t much on the sea floor. There are various instances of nation states tapping cables due to the ease of access when it comes to actually “listening” to the data. Obviously the issue there is getting to the undersea cable. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/the-creepy-long-standing-practice-of-undersea-cable-tapping/277855/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/th...
obiefernandez 6y ago
> will deliver record-breaking capacity of 250 terabits per second (Tbps) across the ocean—enough to transmit the entire digitized Library of Congress three times every second. Damn. Anyone else just agog at this figure?
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  It's not that much in the grand scheme of things. A couple of data centres will saturate the link easily.
Ironlink 6y ago
My Firefox Developer Edition (86) doesn't load the page completely, one of the resources (https://gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com/api/w_v2/pagesByUrl/home/?b=1612399295404 https://gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com/api/w_v2/pagesByU...) has an untrusted certificate (SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER). It is issued by "Cisco Umbrella Secondary SubCA".
- cr3ative 6y ago
  It's issued by GTS CA 1O1 for me. Umbrella sounds like a security thing on your network: https://umbrella.cisco.com/ https://umbrella.cisco.com/
- kristjansson 6y ago
  Turn off your work VPN!
easton 6y ago
Is Google using this for consumer services (Gmail/Search/YouTube/Stadia) that don't run on GCP or is this only for GCP? If it's only for GCP, they are betting big, which is good.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  Google uses gcp.
  - easton 6y ago
    For everything? I was under the impression they still ran all the big stuff on their internal cloud with Borg and all the other infrastructure tooling they built.
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      Yeah, you should think of it more like GCP runs on Borg, not the other way around, although the description is not perfect. Also Google's cloud services like Cloud Spanner and Cloud Bigtable run directly on Borg. What's terrifying is that Google described each of their B4 sites as having 60tbps uplinks in 2017, growing at 100x per 5 years. So a 250tbps undersea cable is nice but when you think about it probably not enough to make intercontinental transfer too cheap to meter.
    - nameless912 6y ago
      My understanding is that GCP is essentially selling off extra capacity in those data centers, so for example your VM running in GCP is scheduled by Borg under the hood. So it's more like GCP runs on Google, rather than Google running on GCP.
tgtweak 6y ago
No mention of latency improvements? Seems crazy since oversea transit (tcp & single-channel) is usually latency (or loss) bound. I would expect it's better than going over public transit and legacy subsea fiber, but it would have been useful to see some comparison tests between POPs.
- trollied 6y ago
  I'm not sure how easy it is to increase the speed of light in glass without some sort of new breakthrough.
  - tgtweak 6y ago
    Not travelling through 20 routers in the process tends to help. Again it would be good to get a tangible idea of how much better this is vs just stating the obvious about peak theoretical throughput.
- virtuallynathan 6y ago
  Google invests a lot in TCP congestion control, mainly through BBR. I believe they do bulk transfers with centrally-scheduled fixed-rate UDP transmission. I also assume they have better control of buffers, loss, and queueing algo’s to prevent/control loss/drops.
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
I see a lot of these fiber lines pop up on tiny islands throughout the pacific. What’s happening at these places? Are there people who work there and if so what are they doing?
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  Tax evasion, err 'financial optimisation'.
m3kw9 6y ago
“ enough to transmit the entire digitized Library of Congress three times every second” the engineer in me: compressed? With images? Or just raw texts?
- andreasley 6y ago
  From 2016: "THE LOC’S DIGITAL COLLECTION currently comprises over 7 petabytes (7 million gigs) with more than 15 million items, including 150,000 print books. In an ideal future scenario, the LOC estimates that it could digitize a further 3-5 PB a year" [1] So only the raw texts, probably. 10TB sounds about right for that. [1] https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-library-of-last-resort/ https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-library-...
ksec 6y ago
I know a lot is focusing on the Bandwidth. But are we making any progress on Long Distance Subsea Cable using Hollow Core Cable, achieving close to maximum speed of light for theoretical lowest latency possible? Imagine cutting latency from West Coast US to Hong Kong by 50ms! Light is only traveling at around 2/3 of speed within Fibre. The previous decades have been around Bandwidth. Is time we shift out focus to latency. 5G is already part of that , and 6G is further pushing it as standard feature. I wish other part of network start thinking about Latency too. May be not network, but everything. From out input devices to Display. We need to enter the new age of Minimal Latency Computing.
- O5vYtytb 6y ago
  My bet is on tech like Starlink with inter-satellite communication. Starlink should have lower latency with space lasers compared to fiber.
  - m_eiman 6y ago
    Won't they be at low enough altitude that they'll need more hops than fiber to get around the globe, where each hop adds at least some delay?
    - xoa 6y ago
      Not sure what you mean by "hops" here? The current beta sats mostly act as "bent pipes", where they relay directly between user terminals and ground stations which then go to out to the regular net from there. But the final deployment sats are intended to have free space optical links between satellites (these are currently deployed and testing on the most recent polar orbit ones), so a connection can go entirely through the mesh in space until it reaches the nearest physical ground station (probably with some weighting for congestion and priority of course). The orbital RTT penalty will only be paid once, and with tens of thousands of sats the optical route will actually be much more direct for many people when crossing oceans than going through whatever undersea fiber links there are. Compared to regular fiber, final Starlink will definitely win on latency over sufficient distances. But Starlink will never match the bandwidth and reliability that fiber can do, nor is it meant to. So it's not a replacement, just another awesome option.
jl6 6y ago
The article mentions the number of fibres in this cable is 12, and that new technology was used to increase that number. What is the limit on how many fibres can go in a cable? Should we expect future cables to have 50 fibres, or 100, or 1000, or more?
- doikor 6y ago
  Problem is powering the repeaters. More fibers are not going to help if you can not use them. They mention in the article the improvements in the repeater design to cut down power draw to allow more fibers to be used.
- blantonl 6y ago
  I think the limitation is based on repeater and laser-pump equipment to repeat the signal along the length of the cable run. I suspect that the repeaters and associated power equipment along the line is pretty big stuff. So the fact that this cable is able to "share" that equipment across the 12 fibers is a breakthrough in technology.
elbac 6y ago
If anyone enjoys this topic, I would recommend reading "A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable" by John Steele Gordon.
crispyambulance 6y ago
The article says this cable uses SDM (space division multiplexing). Which, for fiberoptics, means that you have multiple fibers. Of course they HAVE TO put many wavelengths on each fiber, each wavelength carrying a signal. The "state-of-the-art" AFAIK is to use many wavelengths per fiber, each one carrying ~192 wavelengths each wavelength transporting at up to 100Gbps (this is known as DWDM). So so with SDM, you just have more fibers? So what? It seems like I am missing something here? Why is "SDM" the key concept rather than "DWDM"? Why not just say DWDM with 12 fiber pairs?
- aappleby 6y ago
  I thought the same thing, but they really are sending N completely separate signals spatially separated at the transmitters, then deconvolving them (sort of) at the other end. Relies on very complicated structure inside the glass of the fiber.
- DoomHotel 6y ago
  You can send spatially-separated signals down a single multi-mode fiber. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-53530-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-53530-6
  - crispyambulance 6y ago
    That's interesting! But multimode fiber isn't feasible for thousands of kilometers? This is transatlantic. Wouldn't that have to be singlemode just for the distances involved?
    - sp332 6y ago
      Even single-mode needs repeaters along the length of the cable to get across an ocean. I guess you could use multimode and a lot more repeaters, but that seems more expensive and more failure-prone.
      - aidenn0 6y ago
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
Sigh... Removed because people don't seem to want to see it. Not a big deal, but...sheesh. It's not like it was a troll comment; just a relatively lighthearted poke.
- Schalter 6y ago
  I don't get it. Whats the issue?
  - tomerico 6y ago
    Check the second link. On another note - the third link captures the back button and doesn’t let you get back to hacker news (at least on mobile). What a shitty site.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
      Yeah...remember when SlashDot was Hacker News? How the great have fallen...
    - eitland 6y ago
      Here's a trick from the old days (works in all my mobile browsers[1]): long click the back button, a popup will show your navigation history and you can click the last link before entering the broken site. That said, the behavior is absolutely unacceptable. [1]: And in Firefox desktop you can also do this but I can't remember if it is long-click or right click.
comboy 6y ago
Anyone who has some clue wants to take a shot at what could be investment cost for such a cable?
adriancooney 6y ago
Excellent related Ars Technica article related to deep-sea cables if you want to learn more: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/how-the-internet-works-submarine-cables-data-centres-last-mile/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/how-t...
- atonse 6y ago
  Mother Earth Mother Board is one of my all time favorite articles, which chronicles the laying of a cable. https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
  - dgritsko 6y ago
    Another recommendation in this vein is Arthur C. Clarke's "How the World Was One", it provides some fascinating historical context for how we got to where we are today (or rather, where we were in 1992).
phuff 6y ago
This is a video from google about how laying undersea cables works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9R4tznCNB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9R4tznCNB0 I've always wanted to know! Super cool!
idlewords 6y ago
I'm delighted by all the speculation in this thread about whether the cable laid by the global surveillance company is somehow being spied on.
- blindm 6y ago
  Well we assume any important Internet choke-point is used for surveillance. If I just started surveilling anything sent en clair my first stop would be Internet backbone connections.
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
Old timer story - years ago, Demon Internet (my old employer) was beginning to enter super-growth and wanted to really set itself up for trans-atlantic connections. So they decided to buy a T1 - 45Mbps link across the atlantic. Now it turns out that BT had only ever resold fractions of T1s - they had never actually had anyone want a whole one. And as such their sales commissions did not cap out. So, we rang up, a sales guy picked up the phone and got a million pound pay day, and resigned that evening. But our customers were happy so thats what counts :-)
- ASinclair 6y ago
  Great story!
- john37386 6y ago
  T1 maximum speed 1.544 Mbps T3 is about ~45 Mbps Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-carrier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-carrier
  - lifeisstillgood 6y ago
    My memory is very hazy - too many beers in North London pubs far too many years ago to remember clearly :-0
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    In internetworking a Tier 1 carrier is a carrier that is so interconnected other parties pay to receive traffic from them.
    - zenexer 6y ago
      T1 and Tier 1 are not the same thing.
      - tinus_hn 6y ago
        That’s true. However at least in my memory back in the day people would call the 10 megabit directly connected university connections t1 lines, because of the tier 1 thing.
nippoo 6y ago
This is super-cool! I found "enough to transmit the entire digitized Library of Congress three times every second" to be a really weird comparison though - I'm used to text being really small and compressible, and I doubt many people have an intuitive grasp of how much One Scanned Library of Congress is. How many hour-long Netflix/YouTube episodes per second, on the other hand...
- ehsankia 6y ago
  How long to transfer all of Youtube? ;)
- supertrope 6y ago
  War and Peace is a few MB. A “YouTuber” gossiping in HD is more bits. Luckily video services rely heavily on on-net caches.
- jlund-molfese 6y ago
  I agree, but somehow a LoC became a well-established unit of measuring data transfer[1]. So maybe less-technical readers are used to hearing that comparison. 1 - https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/04/a-library-of-congress-worth-of-data-its-all-in-how-you-define-it/ https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/04/a-library-of-congres...
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    This can join the others - Olympic swimming pool, football fields, London bus, Empire State Building.
- faitswulff 6y ago
  As of March 2019, Netflix is reported [0] to have 60 petabytes of data. Google tells me that 60 petabytes / 250 terabits per second comes out to 32 minutes. I’m not sure that translates to the layperson who might not appreciate what a petabyte is, but in the space of a single show you could theoretically transfer the contents of Netflix’s entire library over this pipe. So basically almost enough bandwidth to transfer the average user’s porn stash in a single day! [0]: https://zeenea.com/metacat-netflix-makes-their-big-data-accessible-and-useful/ https://zeenea.com/metacat-netflix-makes-their-big-data-acce...
manishsharan 6y ago
Oh dear! how is NSA going wiretap that ?
mizzao 6y ago
Is this a private cable that only connects Google datacenters? If so, too bad for open, neutral Internet.
lsllc 6y ago
TechCrunch story about this posted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26017592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26017592
capableweb 6y ago
This cable is not just to be used by Google right? Or am I misunderstanding something? Fundamentally, infrastructure should be publicly owned and then rented by companies to use it, in this case it seems like Google physically owns the cables and infrastructure which would be a massive waste.
- d1zzy 6y ago
  Feel free to convince your government and fellow citizens to use tax money to pay for such infrastructure. Google laying down their own cable isn't stopping anybody from doing so.
- morei 6y ago
  Why is it a waste? If Google has enough demand to fill the cable, then how is it waste? (And I assume that Google has enough demand: If it didn't, why would they build such a large cable?)
- nabla9 6y ago
  >Fundamentally, infrastructure should be publicly owned a No. Good market socialist solution in situations where network investment (electric grid, railway, telecom) creates natural monopolies, is forcing separation of the network and content. For example electric grid owner must allow other sell and buy electricity trough the network. They can only get maintenance fee determined so that it cant be used to distort energy markets in favor of the company owning the grid. In telecom it usually applies only for the last mile.
jdkee 6y ago
For those of you who haven’t read Neal Stephenson’s Wired article on submarine cables from 25 years ago. https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
person_of_color 6y ago
Is this only for Google traffic?

262 points by johannesboyne 6y ago

I know nothing of this type of engineering. How do you even start a project like this? Map the bottom of the ocean, figure out all the danger zones? What is the cost of doing something like this?

chokeartist 6y ago
In nutshell you got it. The cost is basically just bend over and smile (not trying to be glib... it is HUGE).
tyingq 6y ago
"What is the cost of doing something like this?" Their Oregon to Japan cable, 9000km and laid in 2016, cost $300M. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2939316/googles-60tbps-pacific-cable-welcomed-in-japan.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2939316/googles-60tbps...
- sparsely 6y ago
  That is at least 1 order of magnitude cheaper than I would have guessed. Mind boggling that it's cheaper to do that then buy like the 4th best meal delivery app in Canada or whatever.
  - frabert 6y ago
    Yeah that's what I was thinking too. It doesn't sound like money well spent, it sounds like a bargain to me, like "you'd be stupid not to do it" cheap for something the size of Google.
  - Mauricebranagh 6y ago
    That's is what I thought, years ago back when I worked for a big telco we actually had a small fleet of our own cable laying ships. The fun thing was the company hand book had a whole other section of T&C allowances etc if you worked on a ship.
    - bryyyon 6y ago
      Interesting! Would you be able to give us a few examples that'd be in the ship-specific section? I'm curious on what sorts of things would be permissible/acceptable/expected in a ship work environment but not necessarily called out off-ship. Perhaps safety and emergency procedure information?
  - Cerium 6y ago
    Indeed, California spent 20 times as much for a 3.5km bridge.
  - tzs 6y ago
    It's probably cheaper than people would expect because the long run across the deep ocean is a lot more straightforward than most people would expect. 1. For the deep ocean parts of the route, cables and associated equipment (such as repeaters) are simply spooled out from the back of the cable laying ship, to settle on the ocean floor. 2. For shallow waters, the cable is buried. This is done by dragging a plow along the bottom which cuts a furrow and puts the cable into it. The plow has an altitude control and a camera so that an operator on the ship can control it, and a magnetometer to check if the cable is properly buried behind it. 3. For areas where burying isn't practical but they anticipate ships will anchor, they use armored cable. For #1, the costs are going to be the cost to operate the ship while it slowly spools out the cable and the cost of the cable. For #3, same thing, but with more expensive cable. For #2 I'd expect it is similar, except the ship goes a lot slower (about 0.5 knots when using the plow, compared to about 5 knots when laying surface cable). Finally, there is this. #4. At the shores, they need to avoid damaging reefs and other habitats, not wreck the beach, and things like that. The cable needs to be in conduits that are buried or anchored. And building those conduits needs to be done in a way that does not mess up the environment. So what you've got then for a long cable project is two ends that present underwater construction projects, the shallow waters near the two ends where you have to bury the cable, and then the long deep ocean stretch where you are just spooling the cable out. This suggests the costs are going to have a component that doesn't really depend on how long the thing is (the two ends and the shallow waters near the ends where burial is needed) and a component that is proportional to length (the long run between the two shallow waters near the ends). At 5 knots, it would take about 1000 hours to lay the deep sea part of the cable. If the ship costs $50k/hour to operate, that would be about $40 million. (I have no idea what it costs to operate these ships, but Google tells me that big cruise ships cost about that much to operate, and I'd guess that a cable laying ship is cheaper). Assuming the underwater cable itself is 10 times as expensive as regular cable, its about $150 million for 9000 km. That's brings us to about $200 million for the deep ocean part.
    - eitland 6y ago
      > Assuming the underwater cable itself is 10 times as expensive as regular cable, its about $150 million for 9000 km. Still sounds really inexpensive when I consider it contains a large number of repeaters and is meant to stay at the bottom of the ocean. Edit: Forgot to write, I haven't run the numbers myself but I enjoyed your reasoning here, you put a smile on my face : > At 5 knots, it would take about 1000 hours to lay the deep sea part of the cable. If the ship costs $50k/hour to operate, that would be about $40 million. (I have no idea what it costs to operate these ships, but Google tells me that big cruise ships cost about that much to operate, and I'd guess that a cable laying ship is cheaper).
- voidmain0001 6y ago
  That sounds like money well spent, and a good deal considering what it enables. It would be incredible to see the multiple levels of govt around the world collaborate to create a publicly funded (bond sales) project for laying fibre optic across the planet which could not be sold to a private corp, and that guaranteed access to it based on population proportion, not GDP.
syoc 6y ago
I have no idea about how this stuff, but this wired article from 1996 written by Neal Stephenson about undersea cables is a fantastic read. https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
- tclancy 6y ago
  Came here to recommend the same. I reread it every 5 years or so for inspiration.
- MarkusWandel 6y ago
  The article is now almost a quarter century old and the cables have gotten better. In fact, even that cable probably got a lot faster after optical coherent detection was introduced, i.e. much more capable modems. But the way the cables are actually laid and especially the details of the shore landings and the issues of terrestrial runs, are as current as ever.
jesuschroist 6y ago
While not being super technical, there is an interesting miniature "The First Word Across the Ocean" in the "Decisive Moments in History" book by Stefan Zweig. It tells the story and circumstances of how the first trans-atlantic cable (back then for telegraphs) was laid in the late 19th century.
Schalter 6y ago
The funny thing is, that when you realise that they just lay it down on the sea floor and you start to think through all the potential issues with throwing a very thick special cable on the ocean, you will realize that it already just works as it is for a while.
virtuallynathan 6y ago
Pretty much, you do surveys, probably based on existing ocean floor sonography, and then contact out a cable to someone like NEC, TE SubCom, Huawei, etc… Load it up on a cable laying vessel, and use software like Makai Lay to optimally place the cable on the ocean floor. [This is the basic idea, I wouldn’t treat this as an authoritative answer, I’m just loosely adjacent to this industry]

supernovae 6y ago

Is this why they're losing billions?

jiveturkey 6y ago
Your comment is both snide and wrong. lovely combination. I will respond anyway. They are losing billions because they are paying for growth. It is the proper strategy.
- supernovae 6y ago
  only on hacker news could you get downvoted for asking legit questions and dumb answers by apologists... This is what happens when a marketing company starts a cloud right? turns it into a loss leader and everyone who buys it becomes and apologist at all cost. i don't get it.
  - jiveturkey 6y ago
    ah, indignant as well. GCP is not a loss leader. the unit economics are fine.

cmpb 6y ago

Ah the old "entire digitized Library of Congress" per second metric

ThePadawan 6y ago
I always find comparisons using text data incredibly worthless. I'm sure a Shakespeare play or The Great Gatsby are barely a few megabytes. But if you asked Joe Shmoe on the street "In Great Gatsbys, how big was the last picture your iPhone took", they would rightly have zero idea. It's so useless.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bravura 6y ago
  Agreed, number of books stacked end to end to reach the moon is much more intuitive.
- adverbly 6y ago
  Easy! It's just three olympic sized swimming pools worth of dollar bills stacked to the moon in bits.
- edoceo 6y ago
  I think all of Shakespeare was like 450,000 LOC. I used to use that metric when folks ask why it took so long to debug. Like, our project is 600,000 LOC and more complicated than any of his works. He didn't have it all memorized and neither do I. It's a metric PMs can understand.
ericpauley 6y ago
I think this says more about the minuscule (on Google scale) ~10TB size of the digitized library of Congress.

sschueller 6y ago

Do those come with pre attached NSA listening devices [1] ? [1] https://siliconangle.com/2013/07/19/how-the-nsa-taps-undersea-fiber-optic-cables/ https://siliconangle.com/2013/07/19/how-the-nsa-taps-underse...

gnu8 6y ago
Most certainly. You don’t land a cable in either the US or France without a classified annex to the license that provides for interconnection to their intelligence services.
- _Understated_ 6y ago
  Let's say they do tap the cables (I reckon they do too but in case they don't) what can they actually see if the traffic is encrypted?
  - ssijak 6y ago
    And at 250tb passing by every second
  - Keyframe 6y ago
    Considering they do intercept, as widely documented, question is how do they see if traffic is encrypted?
    - jagger27 6y ago
      Pretty trivial. If it looks like random noise, and doesn't have a compression header then it's probably encrypted.
  - eric-hu 6y ago
    I recall seeing a story in the past about how the NSA planted a misleadingly weak encryption library. https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2014/10/new_evidence_of_nsa_weakening.html https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2014/10/new_evidence_of... If the encryption used is flawed, they could see whatever they want.

SloopJon 6y ago

Wow, talk about a barrier to entry. Google already has Curie from North America to South America and Equiano from Portugal to South Africa. They're also working on Hopper from North America to UK and Spain: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/announcing-googles-grace-hopper-subsea-cable-system https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/announ... I presume that the other trillion-dollar companies are getting in on the action too.

amit9gupta 6y ago
Welcome to the new form of Colonialism!!
- anonuser123456 6y ago
  Because Google owns the sea and no one else can lay cable...

onion2k 6y ago

You could load a modern Javascript-powered website in less than a minute with that.

a012 6y ago
My browser loads that page like forever, until I remember to _allow_ javascript on that page, like why on earth they render everything except the content at all.
- LMYahooTFY 6y ago
  This is what I encounter more often than not lately. Is this due to more and more content simply generated by javascript frameworks?
  - speedgoose 6y ago
    Yes and because developers do not have time for the very few people who decided to disable javascript and not enable it when necessary.
- c22 6y ago
  Yeah, it's one thing to build a page that wont render without Javascript, but making the only part that does render be a never-ending spinner is just rude.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
Don't worry, as hardware advances roll out, software bloat will always expand to fill the vacuum.
throw0101a 6y ago
Especially the linked blog post, as it doesn't render unless you allow JavaScript from gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com (per uMatrix). Webdevs: is there a reason why a page would be designed so that JS being on is mandatory? Especially for something as prosaic as a couple of paragraphs of text.

markphip 6y ago

I know there are many of these cables that have been around for years, but I am curious how are they physically secured? Especially where they transit from ocean to land? Is there some long underground/sea tunnel of conduit that the cable is routed through to the basement of some building? Or if you are walking along the beach somewhere is there just some cable running out of the ocean along the beach to some building near the shore? I also wonder what kind of permissions and licenses you need to seek to run a cable across the ocean floor?

sandworm101 6y ago
>> Or if you are walking along the beach somewhere is there just some cable running out of the ocean along the beach to some building near the shore? It is generally buried either under the sand or inside concrete. But yes, there are places where you can get very close to these things if you know what you are looking at. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_landing_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_landing_point Here is a pic of the landing for the US base in Cuba. https://www.dvidshub.net/news/186633/uct-1-unit-choice-gtmo-cable-landing https://www.dvidshub.net/news/186633/uct-1-unit-choice-gtmo-...
chasd00 6y ago
I’ve wondered the same, you can image search and find some pictures. They just sort of come out of the water and go up the beach (I guess what else would happen? Hah) https://media.wired.com/photos/59546c71be605811a2fdcfd0/191:100/pass/TumonBayCableLanding.jpg https://media.wired.com/photos/59546c71be605811a2fdcfd0/191:...
- tyingq 6y ago
  Guessing this would be more typical: https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/.e/interactive/html5-video-media/2019/07/25/Transatlantic_cables_cross_section_gfx_large02.png https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/.e/interactive/html5-video-media/201...
grandpa_yeti 6y ago
You’re spot on. Most of the cables are either laid on the sea floor and up to a beach, or buried underneath beaches. The following link has some good background on what goes into laying cables and how they terminate. https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/25/asia/internet-undersea-cables-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/25/asia/internet-undersea-cables... As for physical security, there isn’t much on the sea floor. There are various instances of nation states tapping cables due to the ease of access when it comes to actually “listening” to the data. Obviously the issue there is getting to the undersea cable. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/the-creepy-long-standing-practice-of-undersea-cable-tapping/277855/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/th...

obiefernandez 6y ago

> will deliver record-breaking capacity of 250 terabits per second (Tbps) across the ocean—enough to transmit the entire digitized Library of Congress three times every second. Damn. Anyone else just agog at this figure?

throwaway3699 6y ago
It's not that much in the grand scheme of things. A couple of data centres will saturate the link easily.

Ironlink 6y ago

My Firefox Developer Edition (86) doesn't load the page completely, one of the resources (https://gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com/api/w_v2/pagesByUrl/home/?b=1612399295404 https://gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com/api/w_v2/pagesByU...) has an untrusted certificate (SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER). It is issued by "Cisco Umbrella Secondary SubCA".

cr3ative 6y ago
It's issued by GTS CA 1O1 for me. Umbrella sounds like a security thing on your network: https://umbrella.cisco.com/ https://umbrella.cisco.com/
kristjansson 6y ago
Turn off your work VPN!

easton 6y ago

Is Google using this for consumer services (Gmail/Search/YouTube/Stadia) that don't run on GCP or is this only for GCP? If it's only for GCP, they are betting big, which is good.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Google uses gcp.
- easton 6y ago
  For everything? I was under the impression they still ran all the big stuff on their internal cloud with Borg and all the other infrastructure tooling they built.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Yeah, you should think of it more like GCP runs on Borg, not the other way around, although the description is not perfect. Also Google's cloud services like Cloud Spanner and Cloud Bigtable run directly on Borg. What's terrifying is that Google described each of their B4 sites as having 60tbps uplinks in 2017, growing at 100x per 5 years. So a 250tbps undersea cable is nice but when you think about it probably not enough to make intercontinental transfer too cheap to meter.
  - nameless912 6y ago
    My understanding is that GCP is essentially selling off extra capacity in those data centers, so for example your VM running in GCP is scheduled by Borg under the hood. So it's more like GCP runs on Google, rather than Google running on GCP.

tgtweak 6y ago

No mention of latency improvements? Seems crazy since oversea transit (tcp & single-channel) is usually latency (or loss) bound. I would expect it's better than going over public transit and legacy subsea fiber, but it would have been useful to see some comparison tests between POPs.

trollied 6y ago
I'm not sure how easy it is to increase the speed of light in glass without some sort of new breakthrough.
- tgtweak 6y ago
  Not travelling through 20 routers in the process tends to help. Again it would be good to get a tangible idea of how much better this is vs just stating the obvious about peak theoretical throughput.
virtuallynathan 6y ago
Google invests a lot in TCP congestion control, mainly through BBR. I believe they do bulk transfers with centrally-scheduled fixed-rate UDP transmission. I also assume they have better control of buffers, loss, and queueing algo’s to prevent/control loss/drops.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

I see a lot of these fiber lines pop up on tiny islands throughout the pacific. What’s happening at these places? Are there people who work there and if so what are they doing?

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
Tax evasion, err 'financial optimisation'.

m3kw9 6y ago

“ enough to transmit the entire digitized Library of Congress three times every second” the engineer in me: compressed? With images? Or just raw texts?

andreasley 6y ago
From 2016: "THE LOC’S DIGITAL COLLECTION currently comprises over 7 petabytes (7 million gigs) with more than 15 million items, including 150,000 print books. In an ideal future scenario, the LOC estimates that it could digitize a further 3-5 PB a year" [1] So only the raw texts, probably. 10TB sounds about right for that. [1] https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-library-of-last-resort/ https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-library-...

ksec 6y ago

I know a lot is focusing on the Bandwidth. But are we making any progress on Long Distance Subsea Cable using Hollow Core Cable, achieving close to maximum speed of light for theoretical lowest latency possible? Imagine cutting latency from West Coast US to Hong Kong by 50ms! Light is only traveling at around 2/3 of speed within Fibre. The previous decades have been around Bandwidth. Is time we shift out focus to latency. 5G is already part of that , and 6G is further pushing it as standard feature. I wish other part of network start thinking about Latency too. May be not network, but everything. From out input devices to Display. We need to enter the new age of Minimal Latency Computing.

O5vYtytb 6y ago
My bet is on tech like Starlink with inter-satellite communication. Starlink should have lower latency with space lasers compared to fiber.
- m_eiman 6y ago
  Won't they be at low enough altitude that they'll need more hops than fiber to get around the globe, where each hop adds at least some delay?
  - xoa 6y ago
    Not sure what you mean by "hops" here? The current beta sats mostly act as "bent pipes", where they relay directly between user terminals and ground stations which then go to out to the regular net from there. But the final deployment sats are intended to have free space optical links between satellites (these are currently deployed and testing on the most recent polar orbit ones), so a connection can go entirely through the mesh in space until it reaches the nearest physical ground station (probably with some weighting for congestion and priority of course). The orbital RTT penalty will only be paid once, and with tens of thousands of sats the optical route will actually be much more direct for many people when crossing oceans than going through whatever undersea fiber links there are. Compared to regular fiber, final Starlink will definitely win on latency over sufficient distances. But Starlink will never match the bandwidth and reliability that fiber can do, nor is it meant to. So it's not a replacement, just another awesome option.

jl6 6y ago

The article mentions the number of fibres in this cable is 12, and that new technology was used to increase that number. What is the limit on how many fibres can go in a cable? Should we expect future cables to have 50 fibres, or 100, or 1000, or more?

doikor 6y ago
Problem is powering the repeaters. More fibers are not going to help if you can not use them. They mention in the article the improvements in the repeater design to cut down power draw to allow more fibers to be used.
blantonl 6y ago
I think the limitation is based on repeater and laser-pump equipment to repeat the signal along the length of the cable run. I suspect that the repeaters and associated power equipment along the line is pretty big stuff. So the fact that this cable is able to "share" that equipment across the 12 fibers is a breakthrough in technology.

elbac 6y ago

If anyone enjoys this topic, I would recommend reading "A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable" by John Steele Gordon.

crispyambulance 6y ago

The article says this cable uses SDM (space division multiplexing). Which, for fiberoptics, means that you have multiple fibers. Of course they HAVE TO put many wavelengths on each fiber, each wavelength carrying a signal. The "state-of-the-art" AFAIK is to use many wavelengths per fiber, each one carrying ~192 wavelengths each wavelength transporting at up to 100Gbps (this is known as DWDM). So so with SDM, you just have more fibers? So what? It seems like I am missing something here? Why is "SDM" the key concept rather than "DWDM"? Why not just say DWDM with 12 fiber pairs?

aappleby 6y ago
I thought the same thing, but they really are sending N completely separate signals spatially separated at the transmitters, then deconvolving them (sort of) at the other end. Relies on very complicated structure inside the glass of the fiber.
DoomHotel 6y ago
You can send spatially-separated signals down a single multi-mode fiber. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-53530-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-53530-6
- crispyambulance 6y ago
  That's interesting! But multimode fiber isn't feasible for thousands of kilometers? This is transatlantic. Wouldn't that have to be singlemode just for the distances involved?
  - sp332 6y ago
    Even single-mode needs repeaters along the length of the cable to get across an ocean. I guess you could use multimode and a lot more repeaters, but that seems more expensive and more failure-prone.
    - aidenn0 6y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

Sigh... Removed because people don't seem to want to see it. Not a big deal, but...sheesh. It's not like it was a troll comment; just a relatively lighthearted poke.

Schalter 6y ago
I don't get it. Whats the issue?
- tomerico 6y ago
  Check the second link. On another note - the third link captures the back button and doesn’t let you get back to hacker news (at least on mobile). What a shitty site.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    Yeah...remember when SlashDot was Hacker News? How the great have fallen...
  - eitland 6y ago
    Here's a trick from the old days (works in all my mobile browsers[1]): long click the back button, a popup will show your navigation history and you can click the last link before entering the broken site. That said, the behavior is absolutely unacceptable. [1]: And in Firefox desktop you can also do this but I can't remember if it is long-click or right click.

comboy 6y ago

Anyone who has some clue wants to take a shot at what could be investment cost for such a cable?

adriancooney 6y ago

Excellent related Ars Technica article related to deep-sea cables if you want to learn more: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/how-the-internet-works-submarine-cables-data-centres-last-mile/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/how-t...

atonse 6y ago
Mother Earth Mother Board is one of my all time favorite articles, which chronicles the laying of a cable. https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
- dgritsko 6y ago
  Another recommendation in this vein is Arthur C. Clarke's "How the World Was One", it provides some fascinating historical context for how we got to where we are today (or rather, where we were in 1992).

phuff 6y ago

This is a video from google about how laying undersea cables works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9R4tznCNB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9R4tznCNB0 I've always wanted to know! Super cool!

idlewords 6y ago

I'm delighted by all the speculation in this thread about whether the cable laid by the global surveillance company is somehow being spied on.

blindm 6y ago
Well we assume any important Internet choke-point is used for surveillance. If I just started surveilling anything sent en clair my first stop would be Internet backbone connections.

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

Old timer story - years ago, Demon Internet (my old employer) was beginning to enter super-growth and wanted to really set itself up for trans-atlantic connections. So they decided to buy a T1 - 45Mbps link across the atlantic. Now it turns out that BT had only ever resold fractions of T1s - they had never actually had anyone want a whole one. And as such their sales commissions did not cap out. So, we rang up, a sales guy picked up the phone and got a million pound pay day, and resigned that evening. But our customers were happy so thats what counts :-)

ASinclair 6y ago
Great story!
john37386 6y ago
T1 maximum speed 1.544 Mbps T3 is about ~45 Mbps Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-carrier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-carrier
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  My memory is very hazy - too many beers in North London pubs far too many years ago to remember clearly :-0
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  In internetworking a Tier 1 carrier is a carrier that is so interconnected other parties pay to receive traffic from them.
  - zenexer 6y ago
    T1 and Tier 1 are not the same thing.
    - tinus_hn 6y ago
      That’s true. However at least in my memory back in the day people would call the 10 megabit directly connected university connections t1 lines, because of the tier 1 thing.

nippoo 6y ago

This is super-cool! I found "enough to transmit the entire digitized Library of Congress three times every second" to be a really weird comparison though - I'm used to text being really small and compressible, and I doubt many people have an intuitive grasp of how much One Scanned Library of Congress is. How many hour-long Netflix/YouTube episodes per second, on the other hand...

ehsankia 6y ago
How long to transfer all of Youtube? ;)
supertrope 6y ago
War and Peace is a few MB. A “YouTuber” gossiping in HD is more bits. Luckily video services rely heavily on on-net caches.
jlund-molfese 6y ago
I agree, but somehow a LoC became a well-established unit of measuring data transfer[1]. So maybe less-technical readers are used to hearing that comparison. 1 - https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/04/a-library-of-congress-worth-of-data-its-all-in-how-you-define-it/ https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/04/a-library-of-congres...
- lostlogin 6y ago
  This can join the others - Olympic swimming pool, football fields, London bus, Empire State Building.
faitswulff 6y ago
As of March 2019, Netflix is reported [0] to have 60 petabytes of data. Google tells me that 60 petabytes / 250 terabits per second comes out to 32 minutes. I’m not sure that translates to the layperson who might not appreciate what a petabyte is, but in the space of a single show you could theoretically transfer the contents of Netflix’s entire library over this pipe. So basically almost enough bandwidth to transfer the average user’s porn stash in a single day! [0]: https://zeenea.com/metacat-netflix-makes-their-big-data-accessible-and-useful/ https://zeenea.com/metacat-netflix-makes-their-big-data-acce...

manishsharan 6y ago

Oh dear! how is NSA going wiretap that ?

mizzao 6y ago

Is this a private cable that only connects Google datacenters? If so, too bad for open, neutral Internet.

lsllc 6y ago

TechCrunch story about this posted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26017592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26017592

capableweb 6y ago

This cable is not just to be used by Google right? Or am I misunderstanding something? Fundamentally, infrastructure should be publicly owned and then rented by companies to use it, in this case it seems like Google physically owns the cables and infrastructure which would be a massive waste.

d1zzy 6y ago
Feel free to convince your government and fellow citizens to use tax money to pay for such infrastructure. Google laying down their own cable isn't stopping anybody from doing so.
morei 6y ago
Why is it a waste? If Google has enough demand to fill the cable, then how is it waste? (And I assume that Google has enough demand: If it didn't, why would they build such a large cable?)
nabla9 6y ago
>Fundamentally, infrastructure should be publicly owned a No. Good market socialist solution in situations where network investment (electric grid, railway, telecom) creates natural monopolies, is forcing separation of the network and content. For example electric grid owner must allow other sell and buy electricity trough the network. They can only get maintenance fee determined so that it cant be used to distort energy markets in favor of the company owning the grid. In telecom it usually applies only for the last mile.

jdkee 6y ago

For those of you who haven’t read Neal Stephenson’s Wired article on submarine cables from 25 years ago. https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

person_of_color 6y ago

Is this only for Google traffic?