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Facebook building subsea cable that will encompass the world
- dpflan 2y agoWhat other private companies have such cables? Google? How do they maintain them? At what point to these become considered "national security" assets (in the eyes of the owning company's nation)? Do they rent them out as business as well? (This blog looks like it could have many such answers, but looking for a HN-comment-sized answer.)
- rootusrootus 2y ago> What other private companies have such cables? Google? Aren't most of them likely to be privately owned? Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are known to have undersea cables. I bet there are a bunch owned by companies that aren't generally known to regular people. For example, Tata, which AFAIK has the largest amount of undersea cables.
- samier-trellis 2y agoDon't some big hedge funds/finance players also have such cables?
- buildbot 2y agoMaybe, but these days, I believe microwave towers are preferred, lower latency and shorter paths. https://www.rec-usa.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/High-Frequency-Trading-Radio-Link-Article10-12.pdf https://www.rec-usa.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/High-Freq...
- RoderickBeck 2y agoAnd far less bandwidth. Microwave is used for ultr-low latency trading. But most financials ride subsea cables like everyone else.
- throwaway314155 2y agoWhat the hell does Tata need underseas cables for?
- placardloop 2y agoTata is one of the largest telecoms in India and is a Tier 1 network that forms the backbone of the modern internet.
- throwaway314155 2y agoOh...so not the consultancy agency. Got it.
- paxys 2y agoSame conglomerate, different company
- cryptica 2y agoIt's becoming apparent that many large tech companies were government-backed entities and their success was fueled by public money. Where else did they get the rights to do this kind of stuff? Surely the public owns these cables as they are built in public waters.
- eru 2y agoThat's why the public also owns all off-shore oil rigs and cruise ships currently at sea?
- ianburrell 2y agoDoes the government own your car cause you drive on public roads? It is possible to build on public land if pay the government land rent, the government doesn't own the building and isn't involved in funding. Also, international waters outside of the boundaries of countries aren't owned by anyone. They probably should be owned by UN to help with problems like overfishing.
- robertlagrant 2y agoWhich nation owns a cable under international waters?
- _1 2y agoThe ones that can hold onto them.
- lxgr 2y agoI'd say the owner owns it, which these days is usually not a nation. What's probably more interesting is what law governs them, and it turns out they're regulated under several conventions, including a dedicated one from 1884 and the UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea). [1] has a pretty good summary if you're curious. [1] https://www.noaa.gov/general-counsel/gc-international-section/submarine-cables-international-framework https://www.noaa.gov/general-counsel/gc-international-sectio...
- helsinkiandrew 2y ago> What other private companies have such cables? Google Quite a few, mostly run by telecom companies, often with a few big users/governments in partnership (including Google/Meta/Amazon etc). A Meta supported Atlantic cable was completed last year. https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
- toast0 2y agoTraditionally, undersea cables were owned / maintained by telephone companies or partnerships of several. Over time, that morphed to telecoms companies, including dedicated networking companies. They'd run their own stuff on the cables and lease out excess capacity. As big tech has been concentrating and also doing more global networking, and running their own backbones and things, they became heavy users of these cables, and then partners, and now sometimes sole owners. I suspect the actual maritime operations are contracted out. I don't know how accurate this is, but it seems like a good start towards a list of cables where big tech is involved [1] [1] https://blog.telegeography.com/telegeographys-content-providers-submarine-cable-holdings-list https://blog.telegeography.com/telegeographys-content-provid...
- RoderickBeck 2y agoMaintenance and repair is third party. Subcom, Alcatel, etc.
- heraldgeezer 2y agoLookup Tier 1 ISPs, they usually have them.
- jhalstead 2y agoYou can see some of the cables in https://cloud.google.com/about/locations#network https://cloud.google.com/about/locations#network
- DANmode 2y ago> At what point to these become considered "national security" assets Decades ago.
- RoderickBeck 2y agoThey are private assets. And really it is impossible to protect them. How do you protect 1.5 million kilometers of spaghetti?
- BrandonMarc 2y agoI expect the company sees them as private, so that they'll only share capacity with competitors when they want to and for the right price, untilllllll .... Some other country decides to pull shenanigans and cut / hack the cable, in which case the company will insist the U.S. gov't get involved, maybe pay for the repair. Saying it's crucial for national security.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- fragmede 2y ago> Do they rent them out as business as well? Microsoft/Google/AWS rent out this capacity in the form of networking capacity on their respective clouds. Your bits between their DCs likely doesn't traverse the public Internet (because that costs them more).
- godber 2y agoThere's an even more recent post https://subseacables.blogspot.com/2024/10/facebooks-semi-secret-w-cable.html https://subseacables.blogspot.com/2024/10/facebooks-semi-sec...
- cjaackie 2y agohyperscalers are amazing, it's hard to comprehend what's the inflection point financially for them to undergo such a massive investment. Just a matter of time I suppose given all the other things you do at that incredibe scale.
- toast0 2y agoMany of these cable projects are less about saving money on buy vs lease, and more about wanting to have more data transmission capacity between the points on the cable.
- RoderickBeck 2y agoIt is about expense. It is cheaper to own than to rent if your traffic is great enough. And ownership provides control and better management.
- mschild 2y agoHighly recommend an article by The Verge on how these things are repaired and maintained. https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea-deep-repair-ships https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea...
- pier25 2y agogreat article but man I hate all that scrolljacking who ever thought this was a good idea?
- svdr 2y agoI think here it is bearable because the page is more like a presentation. The worst is when nothing special happens, and you only notice scrolling is off.
- qwertox 2y agoAbsolutely unreadable because of this. I often just read segments of a paragraph to see if it contains interesting information and scroll on - or back if I think I missed something - but this scrolljacking breaks everything. I've rarely seen a page as bad as this one. I was thinking: "They really should add two toggles to the top of the page: one which makes the images static so that the scroll-problem disappears and one where all the non-relevant, non-technical information is hidden."
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ignoramous 2y agoFor this reason, I usually default to reading text-heavy websites on archive.today (https://archive.today/IpfNq https://archive.today/IpfNq [0]). It disables javascript and statically renders even a dynamic page to the extent that it can. [0] mirrors: https://archive.is/IpfNq https://archive.is/IpfNq / https://archive.ph/IpfNq https://archive.ph/IpfNq / https://archive.vn/IpfNq https://archive.vn/IpfNq / https://archive.md/IpfNq https://archive.md/IpfNq / https://archive.fo/IpfNq https://archive.fo/IpfNq
- prettyStandard 2y agoSo do we sometimes lay cables on top of other cables down there? What governments do you have to go to to get approval to do this? Could I just run a string across the Atlantic Ocean? If we do lay cables on top of other cables how high do they get stacked? Are there challenges to bring the lower cables back up? Does that happen? Or do we just keep them down there forever basically and upgrade the hardware at the terminal?
- wmf 2y agoThey don't bring the cables up unless a repair is needed. It's probably much safer to leave decommissioned cables on the ocean floor so they don't disturb each other.
- staplung 2y ago> So do we sometimes lay cables on top of other cables down there? I don't know exactly how often this has occurred but I'd guess it's relatively rare. The companies that operate in this space are very specialized and sophisticated. The locations of pretty much every cable laid in the last half century is very precisely tracked and one of the first things that has to happen when preparing a new cable route is to undertake a high resolution side-scan sonar survey of all or part of the planned route. In shallower water the cables are typically buried under several meters of the seabed. > What governments do you have to go to to get approval to do this? Could I just run a string across the Atlantic Ocean? At the very least you'll need to have landing agreements with the countries at the various endpoints. In international waters I believe there are some laws that apply but I gather that it's more about liability. You'd have a lot of difficulty running a string across the Atlantic. Controlling the amount of slack on a cable that's being played out is incredibly finicky work. Keep in mind that the point where your hypothetical string is touching down on the sea bed might be several miles behind where you are and that your ship is going to be bobbing around on the surface and you get an idea. > If we do lay cables on top of other cables how high do they get stacked? Are there challenges to bring the lower cables back up? Does that happen? Or do we just keep them down there forever basically and upgrade the hardware at the terminal? Cables are routinely brought up for repair or disposal. The ships that do this are called Agreement ships. In 1866 the second-ever transatlantic cable was grappled up to the surface and repaired (it snapped while laying it the previous year). Modern cables are fiberoptic and do not increase their bandwidth once laid.
- h1fra 2y agoI can't even imagine the price of the cable that will go from Australia to the east coast, that must be astronomical
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bastloing 2y agoThat's a ton of money from a free website.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- eru 2y agoSome people pay for Facebook's services, especially the advertisers. (But also some users in the form of corporate in-house Facebook.)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dopidopHN 2y agoWhat other initiative of that scale do you have in mind ?
- drexlspivey 2y agoFacebook already stole the “Metaverse” branding from Neal Stephenson and now they are trying to set up a data haven. They should put their hub in a southeast Asia island and name it The Sultanate of Kinakuta.
- buildbot 2y agoI’m sure there are a few Neal Stephenson fans in the ranks of the Meta SysAdmin types! Hopefully there a few computers/systems/whatever named after things out of his books.
- lxgr 2y agoWrong Stephenson connection! This isn't a data center, it's a submarine fiberoptics cable – hence clearly a reference to Mother Earth Mother Board [1] :) [1] https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
- animanoir 2y ago[flagged]
- stephen_g 2y agoInteresting that they say this cable is “potentially for AI” - I really wonder to what end? The ‘Ask Meta AI’ thing they’ve put in Facebook and Instagram seems pretty useless, the comment summaries are potentially kind-of useful but surely actually reduces the engagement (if it makes people less likely to read the comments and therefore less likely to comment themselves, or like or reply to comments). So that mostly leaves “AI generated nonsense content” for Facebook and Instagram which surely people are going to get sick of fast…? Just really not actually seeing where they actually get a useful product out of AI here…
- thanksgiving 2y ago> The ‘Ask Meta AI’ thing they’ve put in Facebook and Instagram seems pretty useless, the comment summaries are potentially kind-of useful but surely actually reduces the engagement (if it makes people less likely to read the comments and therefore less likely to comment themselves, or like or reply to comments). Your comment made me think... What if the idea is that Facebook (I refuse to call it meta) is afraid of the very same thing you outlined and therefore thinks that better to be in control of whatever does the cannibalizing with summaries as opposed to letting the OS vendor or potentially web browser vendors control the "AI"? I don't know the future but maybe it is possible that what we have now with AI slop is something like an uncanny valley and there is something better once we wade through this trash? Even if not, it is probably better for them to throw cash at this and it turns out to be a nothing burger than they miss it and now their whole business is in jeopardy.
- mcmcmc 2y ago> Interesting that they say this cable is “potentially for AI” Where did you read that? It’s certainly not in TFA. There’s a second article from the same substack linked on the page that speculates it “ may be heavily influenced by AI considerations”, which is not really the same as “potentially for AI”. https://subseacables.blogspot.com/2024/10/facebooks-semi-secret-w-cable.html https://subseacables.blogspot.com/2024/10/facebooks-semi-sec...
- stephen_g 2y ago
- dietr1ch 2y agoHow much does a cable like that cost? I feel like governments should be funding healthcare, housing and connectivity instead of missiles thousands of miles away from their borders.
- eru 2y agoWhy those specific things? Why not eg bread or circuses? The standard economic answer is that governments should at most finance public goods. But nothing of what you mentioned is a public good. (Well lobbing missiles at foreigners perhaps is a public good, but not one that's necessarily worth funding. Just like a light-house in the middle of nowhere might not be worth funding.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)
- bottom999mottob 2y agoYou're being a bit reductive lol. Also the parent comment doesn't seem to realize that a subsea cable would enable better connectivity for millions of people. 1. Herd immunity and clean air from that Wikipedia link fall under public goods. Both of those are a subset of healthcare. 2. Basic human needs: many people would argue healthcare, housing, and connectivity should be universally accessible as a moral imperative 3. Broader social benefits. If people have these 3 things, they can be more productive. 4. "bread and circuses" is drawing a false equivalence between basic needs and entertainment/luxury goods. That's just bad argumentation.
- dietr1ch 2y agoI'm all in for connectivity, which is very needed all around the world. It's my 3rd spending only behind really pressing social issues, even before education because I think it boosts it so much that we might not need to spend so many resources on it (right now we devote people's lives to teach and pay them miserably), and communication also helps culture and reaching out to more niche interests groups that if you were to simply hang out in your local town.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
- EasyMark 2y agoIf they don't call it Project Jörmungandr then they're fools.
- october8140 2y agoWill this improve my ping in Counter Strike if I am playing with friends on the East Coast and I live in South East Asia?
- corint 2y agoIf & only if Facebook sell access to capacity on the cable publically (They might just keep it for their internal use), and then if any of the providers that the gaming traffic uses start to use capacity on that cable. However, fundamentally, even if fibre took the most direct route from your house, directly straight-line to the datacentre with the server in, and then straightline from there to your friends on the East Coast, the time taken to complete that journey and back is still going to be 150-200msec or so; so it won't be as snappy as if you all lived nearby, sadly.
- loudmax 2y agoThe speed of light through a vacuum is about 300,000 km/s. The speed of light over a fiber optic cable is about 200,000 km/s. The distance between, say Singapore and New York, is about 15,000 km. If we pretend the cable runs all the way to the East Coast, this gets us to 0.075 seconds for light to travel that distance around the Earth over fiber. So that's a theoretical minimum of 75 milliseconds additional lag in addition whatever network equipment exists in between you and your friends. Actually not too bad, even though we concede that the premise is slightly absurd.
- RoderickBeck 2y agoActually the RTD ranges from 58.9 ms to close 80 milliseconds depending on the cable. That is assuming the end points are Secaucus NY4 and Slough LD4. Those re data centers.
- ksec 2y agoWhat you want ( or what I really want ) is hollow cable running at near full speed of light. Currently fibre glass is only 2/3 of light. This could potentially be 50ms latency saving from East Coast to SEA. Unfortunately the tech is so far away it likely won't happen for another 10 years.
- virtuallynathan 2y agoFYI, this is NOT the cable Facebook is planning to build, this is the dream cable of a submarine cable… enthusiast? From LinkedIn: “To be clear, this is not Meta's plan or map. This is Ver "T" and T stands for Tagare. It's what I think is going to happen to this cable if I was designing it. This is my wish list.” https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/map-metas-w-cable-sunil-tagare-blanc/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/map-metas-w-cable-sunil-tagar...
- crazygringo 2y agoI'm confused. Are you saying the article is false? Or that the map illustration is false? Although the map illustration doesn't come from your post. How did you even find the LinkedIn post? Are they the same author? Is TFA based on the LinkedIn post? How do you know? And it seems like the TFA doesn't even have an author, nor can I find an author for their whole blog... Maybe you can clarify all of this, since you seem to have some context here?
- kuroguro 2y agoMaybe he's confusing it with the other post? https://subseacables.blogspot.com/2024/10/facebooks-semi-secret-w-cable.html https://subseacables.blogspot.com/2024/10/facebooks-semi-sec...
- wrigby 2y agoFrom the page header, it sounds like the author is Roderick Beck: “Roderick Beck worked as a sales contractor for Hibernia Atlantic and helps buyers procure capacity and providers make sales.”
- crazygringo 2y agoOh thanks, I totally missed that, kind of hidden at the end of the paragraph. Kinda weird place to put the author but at least it's there!
- bbor 2y agoThe map is current cables, for reference :) https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ AFAICT this post isn't "false" as much as "speculation". Given the news that a cable will be spanning the Atlantic ocean with an end goal of South Asia, South Carolina -> Africa doesn't seem insane. Though it looks like there's no cables there right now... I was coming in here to complain about "encompass" vs "encircle", but now I'm fascinated by this map. Cool webdev, too! EDIT: My biggest takeaway is that we should conquer/buy/steal French Polynesia. Also, huge shoutout to the Leif Erikson cable, connecting Oslo with the absolute middle of nowhere[1] in Canada. Oil rig thing, maybe...? [1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/Z5CEWt16NzHP2QH3A https://maps.app.goo.gl/Z5CEWt16NzHP2QH3A
- zelphirkalt 2y agoI hope we will never live in a world, where something so important is entrusted to such an untrustworthy company. Things like undersea cables are infrastructure and I would not want that controlled by some for profit company with abysmal reputation like Facebook.
- RoderickBeck 2y agoHi, I am the author. The article is not speculation. I know from sources inside Facebook that the cable will head Southeast from the US East Coast directly to South Africa. From there it heads directly to India. From India to Australia. From Australia to the US West. What is speculation are the branching units. It is natural to add branching units to aggregate traffic to more countries. But I have no confirmation. Regards, Roderick.
- giuliomagnifico 2y agoThanks for the reply and the info from inside, very interesting! Congrats also for the blog!
- zombot 2y agoThis will turbo-charge ad delivery. Just what the world needs.