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Google Buys a Piece of a Cable To Japan
Googling Yourself writes "Google announced that they will be part of a six-company consortium that will build a high-bandwidth sub-sea fiber optic cable linking the US and Japan. The new cable system, named Unity, is expected initially to increase Trans-Pacific lit cable capacity by about 20 percent, with the potential to add up to 7.68 Terabits per second of bandwidth across the Pacific. The name Unity was chosen to signify a new type of consortium, born out of potentially competing systems, to emerge as a system within a system, offering ownership and management of individual fiber pairs. Rumors that Google would join the consortium had originally surfaced in September last year but the company had declined to confirm or deny the news."
...someone clips this line?
The CB App. What's your 20?
Specifically this line: "The name Unity was chosen to signify a new type of consortium, born out of potentially competing systems, to emerge as a system within a system, offering ownership and management of individual fiber pairs."
in such a cable?
And how do you figure out the optimal capacity to install anyway? To me 7 Tbits does not sounds like much to link two whole countries. Surely there is some point of diminishing returns, but why not more than this?
Outsourcing jobs to Japan would be the dumbest move ever.
More bandwidth for adverts?
Take Nobody's Word For It.
This coupled with Google's open access ideas for wireless in the US could be a very good thing. Although, having cheaper bandwidth for all will benefit Google as well, of course. As they build and absorb other companies, the bandwidth requirements of their product range is ever increasing.
The Mothership
[...] sustain the unprecedented growth in data and Internet traffic between Asia and the United States. [...](will) increase Trans-Pacific lit (sic) cable capacity by about 20 percent
Seems pretty significant. Additionally I wonder how this will affect other countries within the Pacific region... in particular (because I reside there) Australia. It is a fairly short hop from Japan to Australia, and hopefully at some point the increased bandwidth is extended.
At Chikura, Unity will be seamlessly connected to other cable systems, further enhancing connectivity into Asia.
This statement seems to at least allure to increased bandwidth to all nearby nations, including I suppose nations not "Asian"; e.g. China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Australia and maybe New Zealand. This, of course, is pure conjecture on my part; but a new link to Japan, while being great for Japan, may be just a stepping stone onto even bigger things. My globe just shrunk a little bit more.
If you RTA you see that an Indian company is involved in building the cable as well - it's NOT just Japan.
From the article: "Bharti Airtel Limited, is India's leading integrated telecom services provider with an aggregate of 60 million customers."
Terabits again. I have a friend who doesn't understand Terabits, can someone put that in Libraries of Congress for my...ahem...friend?
I don't really understand LoC, so I googled a figure.
http://www.uplink.freeuk.com/data.html
10 Terabytes: The printed collection of the US Library of Congress
mage@prometheus:~$ calc 7/8
0.875
mage@prometheus:~$ calc 10/.875
~11.42857142857142857143
11.43 seconds per LoC
Outsourcing jobs to Japan would be the dumbest movie ever. http://youtube.com/watch?v=09SAiBiD0ak
Just posted this on my blog: http://lunaticthought.blogspot.com/ (You can find more info here on the economics of submarine fibre and nice pictures of the Tyco Responder Cable laying vessel)
Gigaom is reporting on Google buying a share into the Unity submarine cable. Many people will read into this an attempt by Google to become a telco or do anything out of its current layer 7 service and application business. I don't belief it is, it's just simple economics. Google now buys wholesale capacity instead of retail. My reaction on Gigaom was:
One of the main drivers for wanting your own fibre on certain submarine routes is the pricing strategy of the owners of the submarine fiber. Traditionally these fibres have been owned by incumbent national monopolists. Their pricing was set at a fixed price per Mbit/s. If your banndwidth utilisation grew, their income grew too, though their costs didn't, leading to excess profits. On the Transatlantic route this problem has been solved by having an oversupply of commercial competitive fiber. The oversupply resulted in a situation I call mutually assured destruction, where everybody went bankrupt and whole networks were sold for pennies.
On the Pacific route it's mostly incumbent national monopolists owning fibre and they probably have learned from the Atlantic disaster. This means prices don't drop (or not as quickly as traffic growth) and that means that some parties see an increase in their traffic costs. Google now has solved this by joining a club of submarine fiber owners and not having to worry anymore about the cost of a megabit/s. Google just has to worry about when they will fill up their terabit chunk and when someone will slice through the fibre.
BTW I'm willing to bet Google will join another club on this route to add some much needed redundancy.
Use Adsense for Charity
Also in the news:
Microsoft/Yahoo opens deep sea trawler division.
let's watch out for those stray anchors people.
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
Interesting points. For a (not entirely off-topic) good read on the lost fortunes and tenacity of individuals making a transatlantic cable reality, I'd recommend A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable by J.S.Gordon. The first cable (not fiber-optic of course) was a pain in the butt for all. As far as I know, the lessons learned in those pioneering days are still important. This contains some interesting info on those pioneering days.
BTW I'm willing to bet Google will join another club on this route to add some much needed redundancy.
I am willing to bet you're right.
To the Aussie who said Australia is just a short hop from Japan, uh... never mind.
Do these need power, or do they somehow scavenge power that is built in the line with a traditional copper cable.
..........FULL STOP.
Answer to my question is a few posts down.
..........FULL STOP.
What makes you think it's "your" job?
A brand new fat pipe to download tentacle he^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H internet content!
"Who modded this informative? Whoever it is must've been smokin' some of that martian pot!"
Go back and tell me where it says the cable is going anywhere other than between the US and Japan. It's not.
The fact that traffic might then be passed to and from other indirectly connected networks within mainland Asia (including India) is entirely unrelated to an Indian company's involvement in this particular construction.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
One of Google's motivations for the Trans-Pacific capacity bandwidth is to support the new data centers it will be building in Asia, as discussed here on Slashdot last month and updated today at Data Center Knowledge. In recent months there have been reports that Google has been scouting multiple locations around the Pacific Rim for new facilities, and it could easily have one or more ready by the time the undersea cable is completed in 2010. Google likes strong connectivity between its data centers. The plan isn't to have a Google data center in California serve data more quickly to China and Japan, but to have the Google data centers in California and Asia sync the index, and have the Asian facility deliver lightning-fast results to China and Japan.
Prince Of Space will keep the cable safe!
I heard, a number of years ago, that Australia had bee locked in to using a single provider or two and the cost was astronomical. I think this was in Western Australia primarily, but the situation wasn't too much better even in the more populated Eastern Australia. Do you guys have any competition for broadband out there yet?
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
mbud. mbud bud bud buddabud. ding!
The ping time only gives you latency. Latency is mostly interesting for online gaming. The difference between 200 and 400ms isn't going to get noticed by anyone surfing and certainly not for big downloads or streaming. Also, cable length has very little influence on latency, probably being the cause of only 10-20% of it. Light goes at almost 300KM/sec and as you point out the AJC is only 12,700KM long. Much of the latency is caused in TCP/IP level switching. If an ISP ordered a circuit from Sydney to LA via AJC and Unity, this circuit would be switched at a much lower level that ads virtually no latency. (and this hop won't show up in your traceroute either) A good example:
5 pos4-0.bdr1.syd7.internode.on.net (203.16.212.21) 203.835 ms 203.779 ms 203.355 ms
6 pos2-0.bdr1.sjc2.internode.on.net (203.16.213.41) 202.367 ms 202.518 ms 202.337 ms
7 ge-6-20.car3.SanJose1.Level3.net (4.71.112.85) 202.347 ms 202.269 ms 202.844 ms
The trace goes straight from Sydney to San Jose, even though the cable passes through Hawaii and possibly Auckland too. It simply is a direct circuit.
We also do not have several independent links to the US already. The only significant link we have are the two loops of the Southern Cross cable, both of which have landing points very close together and both go through Hawaii - an undersea landslide or other plate moment could easily take both out at the same time. The only significant(-ish) backup we have is the AJC, which is already at capacity. (which is only half of SCC to begin with!) It would keep us connected to the world if SCC goes down for sure, but it won't be fast.
This new cable system however WILL give us the high capacity redundant link. With the new 2Tb PIPE cable to Guam (over twice the capacity of SCC and AJC combined) going live next year and Unity's southern loop going through Guam also in 2010 it will give us an enormous boost in capacity and redundancy. It also gives us much more capacity in the other direction around the globe, making it feasible to go to Europe via the shorter route instead of the US. I was a bit surprised about the PIPE cable because there isn't enough connectivity currently on Guam to fill up 2Tb. The announcement of Unity makes it all clear, however.
This is a much better map of undersea cables also.
On a related note, this article by Neal Stephenson on laying submarine cables is an awesome (but dated) read.
Japanese speak Japanese. They don't visit or read English-langiage websites any more than Americans visit Japanese-language websites hosted in Japan. Get it? I'm not sure what you're getting at, this looks like Japanese to me...