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> U.S. tech behemoths Google LLC, Meta Platforms Inc and Amazon.com Inc were major investors in at least one, or in Meta’s case both, of those cables, according

by kccqzy 4y ago

> U.S. tech behemoths Google LLC, Meta Platforms Inc and Amazon.com Inc were major investors in at least one, or in Meta’s case both, of those cables, according to public announcements made about the projects. The delays and rerouting of the cables cost each of those companies tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue and additional costs, four sources who worked on the projects said. I wonder if the U.S. government would somehow compensate those American companies for disrupting their business plans. A bit surprised to see Meta here but totally understand the need for ever more cables for Amazon and Google.

d3vmax 4y ago
It does mention in the article that the threat of sanctions makes the more expensive SubCom offer, cheaper in the long run. No compensation required.
toast0 4y ago
> A bit surprised to see Meta here I worked at WhatsApp until 2019. Without details, Meta has a large global userbase, serves lots of video, and stores a large amount of user data in several datacenters (sometimes with replication across oceans). Being a partner in undersea cables is a good way to get committed international bandwidth at relatively low prices. Meta has lots of cash, and there's a clear ROI, so it's an easy decision. Take a look at peering DB, Meta is at many (most?) major peering points, because it improves their product, and having dedicated backhaul from peering points to the datacenters makes the service from the peering points better too.
- kccqzy 4y ago
  An (possibly) apocryphal story at Google is that when Gmail first launched, they figured that email delivery isn't latency-sensitive, so they purposefully set up compute-intensive jobs (like spam analysis) to be cross continent. When it's night time in the U.S. people aren't doing a lot of web searches, so U.S. servers are relatively idle and the entire world's email delivery processing happens in the U.S.; when the U.S. wakes up all those email processing gets done in Europe. My takeaway is that for large companies cost of international bandwidth isn't such a big factor, at least relative to compute.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - eep_social 4y ago
    One of the things I wish I had exfiltrated from a FAANG was the datasheet of ram/cpu/bandwidth/eng hours equivalences for the engineers to make informed decisions on exactly this question.
    - kleton 4y ago
      I'd be surprised if some version of go/rulesofthumb is not in the wild somewhere

by kccqzy 4y ago

d3vmax 4y ago

It does mention in the article that the threat of sanctions makes the more expensive SubCom offer, cheaper in the long run. No compensation required.

toast0 4y ago

> A bit surprised to see Meta here I worked at WhatsApp until 2019. Without details, Meta has a large global userbase, serves lots of video, and stores a large amount of user data in several datacenters (sometimes with replication across oceans). Being a partner in undersea cables is a good way to get committed international bandwidth at relatively low prices. Meta has lots of cash, and there's a clear ROI, so it's an easy decision. Take a look at peering DB, Meta is at many (most?) major peering points, because it improves their product, and having dedicated backhaul from peering points to the datacenters makes the service from the peering points better too.

kccqzy 4y ago
An (possibly) apocryphal story at Google is that when Gmail first launched, they figured that email delivery isn't latency-sensitive, so they purposefully set up compute-intensive jobs (like spam analysis) to be cross continent. When it's night time in the U.S. people aren't doing a lot of web searches, so U.S. servers are relatively idle and the entire world's email delivery processing happens in the U.S.; when the U.S. wakes up all those email processing gets done in Europe. My takeaway is that for large companies cost of international bandwidth isn't such a big factor, at least relative to compute.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- eep_social 4y ago
  One of the things I wish I had exfiltrated from a FAANG was the datasheet of ram/cpu/bandwidth/eng hours equivalences for the engineers to make informed decisions on exactly this question.
  - kleton 4y ago
    I'd be surprised if some version of go/rulesofthumb is not in the wild somewhere