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I don't see any citation here for the 13% figure or how they arrived at this. It superficially seems like they considered any cable which FB/Meta were part owne

I don't see any citation here for the 13% figure or how they arrived at this. It superficially seems like they considered any cable which FB/Meta were part owner of to be owned by them? That FB/Meta is buying into cable systems does not surprise me, considering how the submarine cable industry is structured and the massive scale of FB/Meta. Cables have massive massive capex to build and relatively tiny opex. The cost structure is completely front-loaded and if you want to be paying the lowest cost prices and you have a large enough requirement, the best way to do this is to be part-owner on cable systems (or an IRU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indefeasible_rights_of_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indefeasible_rights_of_use). Edit a bit because I see this line here: partial ownership over 13% of the world's total length of backhaul infrastructure Basically they are adding up the length of all the cables where FB/Meta have any ownership interest (or perhaps just IRUs) and dividing by the total number of submarine cable length. This is wrong for a number of reasons. These cables are shared in a number of ways. Firstly, each cable contains multiple fiber pairs, in some of these FB/Meta is using only 1 of 6 pairs. Secondly, each fiber is further subdivided by extremely precise DWDM technology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-division_multiplexing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-division_multiplexi...) which allows multiple signals to travel along the same fiber. Finally (and less commonly) fibers are divided into segments. This is more common in SE Asia and Africa where a single cable is really a system which may land at 10++ locations, each segment can be a unique route, or sometimes some fibers in the system bypass some locations, sometimes some fiber pairs completely bypass some landing points. Sometimes just some optical channels within a single fiber are diverted to a landing point! The total system design is incredibly complicated and reducing it to this 13% figure is poor. It is completely plausible that on some of these systems that FB/Meta are using <1% of the design capacity.

alphabetting 4y ago
Yeah title framing is a little misleading. They are track to be a part owner of 13% of subsea cables. The article is clearly focused on Meta but I don't think they're an outlier among big tech. Pretty sure Google is the only big tech company to own their own private cables and they have a bunch.
- AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
  Amazon has them too, anyone with a huge datacenter footprint and massive traffic to shift is going to want to own (part of) these systems eventually, it's extremely low risk and great reward.
  - alphabetting 4y ago
    Amazon definitely has a lot of subsea investment but I don't think they fully own cables unless this WSJ piece is wrong. https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-amazon-meta-and-microsoft-weave-a-fiber-optic-web-of-power-11642222824?mod=hp_lead_pos8 https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-amazon-meta-and-microsof... There is an exception to big tech companies collaborating with rivals on the underwater infrastructure of the internet. Google, alone among big tech companies, is already the sole owner of three different undersea cables, and that total is projected by TeleGeography to reach six by 2023. Google has built and is building these solely owned-and-operated cables for two reasons, says Vijay Vusirikala, a senior director at Google responsible for all of the company’s submarine and terrestrial fiber infrastructure. The first is that the company needs them in order to make its own services, such as Google search and YouTube streaming, fast and responsive. The second is to gain an edge in the battle for customers for its cloud services.
    - AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
      Amazon owns 1/6th of CAP-1 (FB/Meta own the other 5/6ths).
  - reilly3000 4y ago
    > low risk I’ll just leave this here. https://www.politico.eu/article/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-threat-to-undersea-internet-cables/ https://www.politico.eu/article/everything-you-need-to-know-...
    - AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
      Physical damage is insured away. It's possible the insurance policies exclude (nation state) terrorism but any good nation state terrorist is going to do it in the most deniable way possible, probably by having a fishing boat "accidentally" drag anchor over your cable.
virtuallynathan 4y ago
Yea, this is a terrible way of calculating this. I would like to see it done based on capacity (which sadly isn't public for part-ownership).
- AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
  > which sadly isn't public for part-ownership It kinda is. Interestingly a lot of these seem to be divided up by fiber. E.g. for CAP-1 it's a 6-pair system, FB/Meta own 5, Amazon owns 1. This is from https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/trans-pacific/cap-1 https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/trans-pacific/c... I'm not sure what their source is though. Calculating fiber pairs -> bandwidth is much much harder though and is an implementation detail which will absolutely change over time. I have no doubt that part of why FB/Google/Amazon want to own fiber this way (owning dedicated pairs) is so they can experiment with different WDM technologies. Their capacity for failure in the overall system is far higher than the traditional companies who are selling circuits and must design things for many nines of reliability.
dang 4y ago
Yes, the submitted title broke the site guidelines, which ask: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (Submitted title was "Meta will own 13% of global submarine cables by 2024". We've reverted it now.) Submitters: if you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
- AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
  Thanks for updating it, but, my comment was less about the title and more about the article which uses the 13% but fails to mention how they calculate this and I (pessimistically) think it's intentional because if you do a better calculation the number is probably more like 1% and 1% sounds a lot less scary than 13%. Also, I feel special now that you replied to one of my comments, thanks for all your work to keep HN a civilized place :)

alphabetting 4y ago

Yeah title framing is a little misleading. They are track to be a part owner of 13% of subsea cables. The article is clearly focused on Meta but I don't think they're an outlier among big tech. Pretty sure Google is the only big tech company to own their own private cables and they have a bunch.

AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
Amazon has them too, anyone with a huge datacenter footprint and massive traffic to shift is going to want to own (part of) these systems eventually, it's extremely low risk and great reward.
- alphabetting 4y ago
  Amazon definitely has a lot of subsea investment but I don't think they fully own cables unless this WSJ piece is wrong. https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-amazon-meta-and-microsoft-weave-a-fiber-optic-web-of-power-11642222824?mod=hp_lead_pos8 https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-amazon-meta-and-microsof... There is an exception to big tech companies collaborating with rivals on the underwater infrastructure of the internet. Google, alone among big tech companies, is already the sole owner of three different undersea cables, and that total is projected by TeleGeography to reach six by 2023. Google has built and is building these solely owned-and-operated cables for two reasons, says Vijay Vusirikala, a senior director at Google responsible for all of the company’s submarine and terrestrial fiber infrastructure. The first is that the company needs them in order to make its own services, such as Google search and YouTube streaming, fast and responsive. The second is to gain an edge in the battle for customers for its cloud services.
  - AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
    Amazon owns 1/6th of CAP-1 (FB/Meta own the other 5/6ths).
- reilly3000 4y ago
  > low risk I’ll just leave this here. https://www.politico.eu/article/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-threat-to-undersea-internet-cables/ https://www.politico.eu/article/everything-you-need-to-know-...
  - AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
    Physical damage is insured away. It's possible the insurance policies exclude (nation state) terrorism but any good nation state terrorist is going to do it in the most deniable way possible, probably by having a fishing boat "accidentally" drag anchor over your cable.

virtuallynathan 4y ago

Yea, this is a terrible way of calculating this. I would like to see it done based on capacity (which sadly isn't public for part-ownership).

AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
> which sadly isn't public for part-ownership It kinda is. Interestingly a lot of these seem to be divided up by fiber. E.g. for CAP-1 it's a 6-pair system, FB/Meta own 5, Amazon owns 1. This is from https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/trans-pacific/cap-1 https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/trans-pacific/c... I'm not sure what their source is though. Calculating fiber pairs -> bandwidth is much much harder though and is an implementation detail which will absolutely change over time. I have no doubt that part of why FB/Google/Amazon want to own fiber this way (owning dedicated pairs) is so they can experiment with different WDM technologies. Their capacity for failure in the overall system is far higher than the traditional companies who are selling circuits and must design things for many nines of reliability.

dang 4y ago

Yes, the submitted title broke the site guidelines, which ask: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (Submitted title was "Meta will own 13% of global submarine cables by 2024". We've reverted it now.) Submitters: if you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
Thanks for updating it, but, my comment was less about the title and more about the article which uses the 13% but fails to mention how they calculate this and I (pessimistically) think it's intentional because if you do a better calculation the number is probably more like 1% and 1% sounds a lot less scary than 13%. Also, I feel special now that you replied to one of my comments, thanks for all your work to keep HN a civilized place :)