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Google Planning New Undersea Cable Across Pacific?
tregetour writes "Google is planning a multi-terabit undersea communications cable across the Pacific Ocean for launch in 2009, Communications Day reports: 'Google would not strictly confirm or deny the existence of the Unity plan today, with spokesman Barry Schnitt telling our North American correspondent Patrick Neighly that "Additional infrastructure for the Internet is good for users and there are a number of proposals to add a Pacific submarine cable. We're not commenting on any of these plans." However, Communications Day understands that Unity would see Google join with other carriers to build a new multi-terabit cable. Google would get access to a fibre pair at build cost handing it a tremendous cost advantage over rivals such as MSN and Yahoo, and also potentially enabling it to peer with Asia ISPs behind their international gateways — considerably improving the affordability of Internet services across Asia Pacific.'"
So will the NSA tap it at the google datacenter with their permission ala AT&T or will the Navy have to tap it will one of those fancy subs we keep hearing about that lifts the cable off the seabed and can splice without interruption?
Because you know there's no way "homeland security" is letting that happen without monitoring.
You know with these kinds of resources, if Google ever did turn evil, we'd never figure it out until it was far too late...
...And allowing it to (dis)allow oppressive governments to continue to block/monitor Internet access.
This may have been a brilliant move on Googles' part. Fully cooperate with the Chinese governments' "Great Firewall" until they could put themselves in a position to undermine that authority.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
I think it is great if it is true. I like the redundancy plan. But, since they don't specify the route, I am very skeptical. On the other hand, who am I to talk. I have never put a job opening on Monster looking for a "submarine cable negotiator." That is frickin' hilarious.
Me? I would go up through Alaska, through Russia via the Bering Sea. Cap'n Sig would do most of the work for me on the Northwestern. I would avoid doing a Portland-to-Tokyo route because of the ring-o-fire thingy.
I fell in to a burning ring of fire, I went down,down,down and the flames went higher. And my mod went lower.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Why are we trying to reduce the cost of Asian providers when the US' is still overpriced, unreliable, and underserved?
Last time I checked, Japan and SK had amazing speeds (10-100mbit) for very affordable prices. It's still a matter of government intervention, not corporate meddling.
Satellite is great for some applications, but lousy for real-time communications.
Video surveillance and satellite would work fine together: a 1 second delay usually isn't a concern in such applications. Same thing with batch jobs and large file transfers.
But for short message/interactive applications (games, shells, telephone communications), an undersea cable is, right now, the best communications path. Very high bandwidth and shortest-path. The big downside of a cable is that it is more vulnerable to damage by nature or by vandalism.
Satellites are awesome for some applications, but they have significant trade-offs. Namely, expensive, unrepairable equipment, jamming potential, and the highest conversational delays.
As I understand it, Australia (and probably everyone else, for that matter) has been getting reamed by the USA as regards Internet peering arrangements. Bandwidth costs have always been higher here, and it's not all to do with a lack of local competition, although that used to be a credible story back when Telstra was charging twenty cents a megabyte for permanent dial-up connectivity. These days the economic pressure is mostly conspicuous for the fact that local hosting services are so expensive. If Google busts up that cosy little oligopoly, I'll love them to bits for it. To gigabits, even. (Sorry. Preemptive pun. Someone had to do it.)
Is this a part of Google's answer to the whole carrier sabre-rattling about non-neutrality and wanting a slice of Google's profits? There's no better way to ensure fair treatment than to provide your own infrastructure. Is this Google's way of saying to the carriers, "get over it, guys -- bandwidth is a fricken commodity now, and we're going to compete with you to make it so, so kiss your old monopoly profits goodbye." There's a high barrier to entry in this market, and you'd be mad to buy your way in only to compete all the profits out of it -- unless you happen to be a major consumer of bandwidth yourself, like Google.
Must... not... get... hopes... up...
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
has officially commenced.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Well, there's nothing like wired network access for security... ;D
What about Africa? This is a continent that needs Internet access more than any other and a new undersea cable is embroiled in bitter political animosity IMHO Google could generate a lot of good will for itself focusing in the area that needs the most attention.
"...behind their international gateways..."
You mean Firewalls, don't you?
Now they wont even have to run their spiders anymore, nor use gmail to create targeted ads.
They will just snoop everybodies traffic....
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I guess that's one way to achieve net neutrality. Now they just need to run their own backbone to every major peering point and ISP in the rest of the world...
>Submarine's run on cables?!
Submarine means "under water", you subliterate.
In the US and its helper countries, they just get rack space where needed.
So the best way is to get as much of the worlds data moving via NSA friendly countries.
For everything else, there's the USS Jimmy Carter to bend the fiber.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Don't get the vapors, everyone. Google is buying one fiber pair. This will lower their costs, but only that. There will be, what, 200+ fiber pairs in that cable. There will be some to go around if anyone else wants to pony up.
As for "considerably improving the affordability of Internet services across Asia Pacific,'" I don't follow that at all. Google doesn't sell transit. The new cable might do that, but not because of Google - because real ISPs will get other fiber pairs and use them to sell transit.
Next, we'll get articles about how Google's corporate jets will revolutionize air transport in North America ! (At least, for Google execs.)
The New World Order will unite all the world, breed us into a Grey Race, destroy our culture so we must get our values from television and malls, and then will make us all slaves to even more boring corporate jobs, but they'll be "happy" in the Apple/Google way.
I almost want Microsoft to win, because at least they've got part of the fascist aesthetic down. This Nanny Corporate State NWO bullshit is just depressingly silly.
Anti-Globalism
It is actually an air pipe. How do you think they breathe down there? Geeze, use your head!
i can be 'unhappy' in a gray world of corporate google than the current what-the-hell-is-this world we are living in now.
Read radical news here
In Asia Pacific? Well Japan has FTTH for cheap.. Um... I know the US has made sure India has cheap enough internet access... So forget Asia, let's make cheap broadband here. Not $40/month for 3Mbps or 5Mbps. How about $20? Or how about $40/month for 10Mbps? I know you like holding onto your money, but faster kthx
If any stupid net.neutrality laws get passed it gives the goog bargining power. "oh hello data pipe operator. Want to peer with us? We have Asia. We'll trade you for unfettered access to the americas"
fibre is currency in this century.
Need Mercedes parts ?
When did Google hire Randy Waterhouse?
"Saunders' presentation warned of the potential for the new cables to create a new trans-Pacific capacity bubble"
...What?
moox. for a new generation.
I was prompted me to look at the wikipedia and found this interesting article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable
I particularly found very interesting the map with all the undersea cables in the world. Pretty cool.
Why can't the USA get decent internet?
Why am I stuck with 1.5m/384k DSL?
When will FiOS get to Oklahoma!!!
Charming man. I wish I had a daughter so I could forbid her to marry one. -Arthur Dent
They're going to build Rapture under the sea!
its much lower latency.
Web Design
I think they may be preempting the net neutrality issue.
...
See, if the net does not become neutral (i.e. tiered access), they would be seriously affected and have to pay the ISPs so their sites are in the top tier (think servers where Adsense is served from).
If they now own the pipes, they can avoid this whole debate altogether.
Then again, the net neutrality issue is about the last mile (provider to end user), so that may not be it
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
http://mybroadband.co.za/blogs/2007/06/11/google-favours-kenya-over-sa/ With a Google data center in Kenya and its vested interest in expanding the world's infrastructure, we may see the day when a Google laid line gets dropped right off the African coast...
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
You are assuming that google is not an NSA front. Think about it, they monitor and record your web browsing habits, your travel plans, they scan your email, they want you to use their online word processor, ... That wanting to know everything about you and your behaviors and interests for the purpose of directed commercial advertising is a beautiful front. ;-)
This may have been a brilliant move on Googles' part. Fully cooperate with the Chinese governments' "Great Firewall" until they could put themselves in a position to undermine that authority.
The Google office, all the data it collected on Chinese individuals, and one end of that cable all exist in Chinese territory. Google operates at the pleasure of the Chinese government. The day Google attempts to move against that government is the day all Google's property and data becomes property of the government and Google's employees are arrested.
I would go up through Alaska, through Russia via the Bering Sea.
Environmentalists would never allow the cable to go through Alaska. I'm sure it would have to touch some sort of pristine wilderness and the lawsuits would never end.
Something is fishy about that map. On the West side there are 5 lines headed towards Asia, but on the Asian side there are only 2 lines coming in from the East. Do we have 3 cables only going to the mid-pacific? Also there is no explanation for the blue lines and the dotted line, what do these signify?
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
Neal Stephenson did an article for Wired on the laying of global fiber optic cable about a decade ago. It's a long read but a good one (kind of like Snow Crash was). He travels around the world following the laying of FLAG (Fiber Link Around the Globe). He covers everything from laying the cable, to the landing points, to over-land connections, to telco monopolies, to everything else. If you're a geek and into submarine cable laying, then the article below is almost required reading. http://econ161.berkeley.edu/OpEd/virtual/stephenson.html
My favorite quote doesn't fit into 120 characters. Now no one will like me.
Don't miss this:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html
It was posted (here I think) on a previous related story, it's very long, and I would not have expected to find the subject interesting, but the article makes it fascinating and very readable.
I was messing recently with Subrosasoft's free GlobalTraceRoute app (OS X). All the traces I did on Google went to Australia. www.google.com, www.google.co.uk, www.google.co.jp, the lot. Just tried to reproduce this from home but can't as I'm on satellite and the TTLs keep expiring.
A friend and I made the assumption that given the time of day (Approx. lunchtime, EDT), it was the middle of the night in Oz, so maybe Google was doing some kind of global load balancing, using places where resources were cheapest on a daily basis (i.e. at night) to do the bulk of processing. By this logic, the traceroute would move around the globe with the night, so maybe Australia, India, Europe, the US, back to Australia over 24 hours. However, when I tried the trace again around 1800 EDT, the destination was still Australia, as it was the next morning.
Was the software wrong? Is Google faking it to make it look as if it's in Oz? Or do they really have huge datacenter there?
Also there is no explanation for the blue lines and the dotted line, what do these signify?
That anyone can upload an image to Wikipedia?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
Fiber is simply the gold standard. A single thread of fiber, with suitably expensive terminal equipment, has more bandwidth than the entire world's wireless devices. Once the infrastructure is in place, it can be upgraded at the end points with relative ease compared to the enormous cost of laying the fiber in the first place.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
Rumor has it that "Undersea Transatlantic Cable" will be embedded in and inextricably intertwined [ouch!] with the next MS Windows release. VeryLongHorn indeed.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is exactly what I was looking for!