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120 Gigabit Pipe To Oz Begins Operation
dustpuppy writes: "The new Southern Cross Cable Network connecting Australia to the US is now operational. Featuring 120 Gigabit capacity and with a latency of 70 msec, the new trans-Pacific cable is 120 times the capacity of the existing Australasia/North America connection. Now us poor Aussies can download our mp3s that much faster! You can read more about it here." Interesting, too, how it's constructed. From the article: "The network consisted of two separate cables configured in three self-healing rings, with all three rings to be completed early next year. The duplicate-ring construction gave the network greater redundancy - if one side of the network was damaged or became inoperable, traffic could be transferred to the other side instantly." Neat.
Have fun!
Link.
Yes, but how big are these mp3s? Are these punk mp3s? Leonard Cohen mp3s? =)
But then it's like most (usually lying) women say: "it doesn't matter how big the mp3 is, only how long you can maintain your connection."
end communication
While I'm here, someone mentioned that 70ms is pretty slow for this type of connection - which amazes me, because it blew me away that they could get it that low. (remember, we're talking 1 direction latency here - not ping times, which would atleast be double)
A quick calculation:
A quick check of the net tells me that the distance from Sydney (where the cable is landed in .au) to Los Angeles is 7487 miles (according to a travel agent flight distance site - who knows?), or about 11979km. (pretty similar to the diameter of the earth, which is 12742km)
The speed of light is roughly 299,792,458 m/s so, the best (according to current physics :/) time we can do is about:
39.957 milliseconds
Just at the speed of light we lose almost 40ms, then they've gotta switch it at several points along the way, and while optical switches EXIST, it seems unlikely they're doing optical switching yet.
All in all I reckon the 70ms figure is AMAZING..
Okay, now Australia has a broad enough pipe that they might as well be part of the US, from a network-routing point of view. Western Europe has been in that situation for a long time; there's no real difference between getting something from Britain, France, Oklahoma, and now, Australia. When is the rest of the world going to join in? The "ring of fire" around Africa seems to have dropped out of the news. I know of no major plans for eastern europe or asia. Is the rest of the world economically well off enough that soon they will be players, too?
I've had this sig for three days.
If I were in charge I'd just connect a long phone line.
I've been a nerd nearly all my life, but it still floors me to think that it takes longer for information carried by sound to travel between two people yelling to each other from opposite ends of a stadium in Sydney than it does for information carried by the Net to travel between two people chatting from opposite sides of the globe...anybody else feel this way?
Or are they going to forgo their censorship?
Fight Spammers!
Speed of light is about 300,000 km/sec
Network distance from Australia to USA is about 15,000km, noting that the network is a ring and it's said to be 30,500km long.
15000/300000=0.050 seconds=50 ms.
So 70ms is not too bad, considering that the speed of light in fibre optic cables isn't as fast as in space, and there is probably some network latency at the ends and the repeaters.
That's why I'm an HPB. It's about 150msec(Pacific Ocean) + 120 msec (56K modem signal processing time) + 50-100 msec for various internetwork latencies. So I end up with 370msec on a good day.
Cheerio,
Link.
See Map of network for details.
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Actually, the speed of light is _exactly_ 299,792,458 m/s. That number is what defines a meter. :-)
I'm not sure about the Pacific floor, but I know the Atlantic floor is expanding -- so this applies to trans-Atlantic cables at the veyr least.
As the plates expand at the rate of [inces/feet?] per year, what happens to the cables? Is the growth small enough that the cables won't stretch to a critical frailty until after they've outlived their usefulness?
http://it.fairfax.com.au/communications/20001114/A 41389-2000Nov10.html
"A 155 megabit circuit between Sydney and California, licensed for 15 years, which cost $US10.3 million, was discounted by 18 per cent if purchased before the November sales deadline."
It cost about 20c/MB retail for bandwidth in aus. This works out to a markup of 1400 times (see 1) between long term and short term prices.
I hope this link does bring down retail prices.
1) $ 10300000 / (15years * 155megabit * 52weeks * 7days * 24hours * 60minutes * 60 seconds) = 0.014 cents / megabit
I think i worked it out correctly
Actually, it's not that much bandwidth. Assuming a normal 16QAM signal (and that's being rather conservative), you get roughly 4 bits/Hz. Therefor, 1 Gbps is roughly 250 MHz. One TV channel is roughly 6 MHz, so this is only about 40 TV channels. One satellite (C band) is 26 transponders, or half the needed bandwidth.
Looked at another way: 250 MHz bandwidth at 26 GHz is a Q of 100.
www.eFax.com are spammers
The bandwidth has nothing to do with latency. Even if it were going at the speed of light, there'd be latency issues when going halfway around the globe. 7 ms, as you suggest, is faster than it would take light to travel the same distance.
The speed of life is a bitch, ain't it?
What did you eat today? http://www.atetoday.com/
That's largely because my provider is crap, but also because the only usefull way out of the country is by a fat link on the other side of the country. Theres lots of landline to carry traffic, and it seems to get broken a lot. The second route ex-Sydney is oversubscribed, and is useless as a contingency when the main one dies.
I'll be the first to admit scepticism that this thing would ever be completed, but now that it is, the whole world changes for US. A whole bunch of new world-class providers will move down here now, instead of the second rate crap we've had to date.
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A map of Australia's links to the US and the rest of the word is here.
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Unfortunately, high-bandwidth wireless (anything near this scale) is impossible. Not just hard. The sheer amount of spectrum it would take up to get 1G/s, given that you can only shove so much information over so narrow a band, is prohibitive. With small-scale wireless, it's not a big deal; the signal fades out in significantly less than a mile, and other transmitters can use the same range. To actually get worldwide wireless, without repeaters, would mean literally flooding the airwaves... ouch. Especially for future expansion; the US has enough difficulties now just splitting up the spectrum we have.
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