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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?
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.
In congress terms, a terabit is a thousand pipes.
shin phantomflanflinger
Outsourcing jobs to Japan would be the dumbest movie ever. http://youtube.com/watch?v=09SAiBiD0ak
Being as the standard estimate used in the LoC/s standard (20 terabytes/sec), and it's a 7.68 terabit line, you can do some simple math.
.96 terabytes/sec in bandwidth, so you'd get the Library of Congress in around 21 seconds.
Assuming that a terabyte is 8 terabits, the line adds
So approximately 1/21 LoC/sec, or 2.85 LoC/min.
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
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.
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.
No, more bandwidth for undersea-cable rape hentai.