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Can someone enlighten me about the real interests behind this venture? 80k people, of whom only a fraction might actually be interested in purchasing internet
by unimportant 12y ago
Can someone enlighten me about the real interests behind this venture?
80k people, of whom only a fraction might actually be interested in purchasing internet access is a really small amount compared to the huge cost of the project.
Japanese people aren't very interested in non-japanese websites either, so there is not a huge demand for additional bandwidth to Europe to my knowledge.
Did they get huge gov grants to pull this off or are there actually businesses committed enough to bandwidth purchases that this is likely to be a profitable project?
- arethuza 12y agoLondon and Tokyo are two of the worlds top financial centers - I don't think this has much to do with general internet access and everything to do with trading. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_centre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_centre [NB The article makes this pretty clear]
- unimportant 12y agoAny bank / investment company that does high frequency trading and the like where milliseconds matter will have servers located locally in Tokyo or London.
- peteretep 12y ago4th sentence: "but the investors and companies eager to send information—stock trades, wire transfers—are so intent on earning a fraction-of-a-second advantage over competitors that the US $850 million price tag for the approximately 15,600-kilometer cable may well be worth it."
- unimportant 12y agoI doubt all of this takes much bandwidth though and I doubt they're willing to invest huge sums for something everyone will have access to anyway after it's completion.
- nobodyshere 12y agoI wonder if in such quantities it costs less than copper wire of the same length with respective infrastructure.
- arethuza 12y ago"everyone will have access to" What makes you think everyone will have access to all of the bandwidth on the cable. It's pretty common for large companies to buy dedicated blocks on bandwidth on long distance links for their own internal private networks and such things are not cheap and often have maximum latency requirements that are nothing to do with financial trading.
- unimportant 12y agoThe line is 24 terrabit, so it's reasonable to assume that everyone will have a chance to peer to it, as it's unlikely to be fully booked.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y agoIf you gotta lay cable, you might as well lay a lot.