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Cable-Laying Boom Will Boost Internet Capacity
Barence writes "Dozens of new undersea internet cables are set to be laid over the next couple of years, providing a huge boost to worldwide capacity. The huge boom in internet video has led to doomsday scenarios of the internet running out of capacity. Although experts believe that there is abundant amounts of 'dark fibre' lying unused in oceans across the world, major telcos are pushing ahead with projects that will see at least 25 new cables laid by 2010, at a cost of $6.4bn."
Not another Domesday scenario! I prefer cubes...
i assume it amounts to 90% of the fibre on earth...
Afraid of a little census, are you?
This guy's the limit!
Directly from San Bruno to London, Paris, Stockholm!
They'd better be anchor-proof.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
Anchors Aweigh!
What?
The cables are predominantly set to be laid in areas such as Africa, the Caribbean and the Middle East, which are currently underserved.
So, in the Caribbean and Africa? Is the demand for video and other such growing traffic in huge demand there?
It doesn't seem that it will really increase traffic throughput for the Eu and the US where this traffic has the most potential to grow.
Am I wrong?
I guess there's not much to say except 1) yay, the internet is not going to reach capacity and 2) now I won't have to worry about going back to magazines for pr0n. Much easier to clear your cache and history than finding a good wife/girlfriend/son proof hiding spot at the house.
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
I guess it's early in the morning...
Sigh. 'editors'.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
More targets for "boat anchors'
On the serious side, anything that adds a little bit of redundancy to the internet isn't a bad thing
Check out my sysadmin blog!
Anyone else not worried as the Telcoms have been playing the artificial scarcity bit for years?
I don't care about more fiber in the oceans nearly as much as I care about fiber in the last mile to my house. So far living in North America doesn't have me watching BBC streaming videos yet.
Of course, this does mean that ship anchors are less likely to take down countries than before.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Dozens of new undersea internet cables are set to be laid
Look, even cables get laid
Who here really things the Internet is going to hit some capacity ceiling? Get over it. It won't happen. Did not happen to USENET back in the day and won't happen now.
And when will the editors learn to read or at least use a spell checker?
Not that laying all this undersea cabling will do anybody any good due to "last mile" crap.
Artificial scarcity is, for example, exemplified by the movie "Hancock". Bandwidth not being used is like food that is not served. It is a misrepresented, but real, scarcity.
I think we've all been through the various domesday scenarios: Biosphere II probably being the most well known. I guess there's not much to say about them except remember to bring some extra oxygen...
Bow-ties are cool.
There is a Wikipedia Article about it, and a book with the title that seems largely unrelated. We all know there are many rumors about Google Buying It.
How much is there though? What kind of fiber is it? MMF or SMF? Also, if this fiber has been unused for years, it would have to be tested to make sure it doesn't have any major breaks in the lines.
Depending on the type, location, amount, and condition of this fiber it could be a major asset... or not. I haven't been able to find any detailed information about it, I'm sure some of our Slashdot crowd working in networking must have a better idea than I?
Domesday was a long tome ago... :)
I have not lost my mind... it's backed up on disk somewhere!
...the cables lay you!
...To write another 30 page essay on how the ocean is deep, poor foreign countries are hard to work in, and new problems are really all just old problems rehashed by people with too much free time on their hands. Oh, and something towards the end about how optical fibers get data from one country to another over 1500 miles away.
K, so the world gets more connections to each other. ...
Undoubtedly a good thing, however
Here in the US, where are my 100mbps connections?
Kthnx
...are less about "undersea fiber-optic cable" availability, as far as I'm concerned, and much more about packet-throttling by the local ISP.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
The extra interlinks will also relieve bottlenecks elsewhere. Since most Internet bandwidth now goes through the US, other links offloading from the segments tying the US together will also increase the spare capacity of those relieved internal links.
The telcos are going to have to lie a lot harder to pretend that there's not enough US bandwidth to retain Network Neutrality, and instead start the Net Doublecharge on bandwidth already paid for at the other ends.
--
make install -not war
.. lay some more "internet cables" under my street?
The Internet? Or are we talking about any old internetwork?
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTAT-1
WTF? "not commercially viable"
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
Which is excellent BTW
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html
It also resulted in one of the thickest copies of Wired ever produced (seriously, it was like a friggin' phone book.)
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Mad parent underrated. Even if you don't think it's funny, it isn't offtopic to joke about a typo in the summary.
If it really is a domesday scenario, we can always call on Max Rockatansky. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hQC3nkftrk&feature=related
all the cables are MADE IN CHINA, and have all sorts of warning labels on them like: "Do not overload with data, may cause fire," "never expose to water." "do not use in bathtub, " "strangulation risk," etc.
I am not an American and I have been spelling Doomsday wrong all along. See? Slashdot is an awesome tool to learn about the world around you and indeed, yourself. Tell your boss that next time he bitches about you "slacking off" on /..
Winkey shortcut mapping for 64bit windows. WinKeyPlus
You'd be surprised what a few dozen Mb/sec sustained can do to some of these countries in the middle of nowhere. Nevermind if there's an undersea cable break.
This can't happen soon enough.
I like music
This is not really a breakthrough.
we've known this for years. And, the telcos and network owners keep telling us that bandwidth is scarce. It's not scarce. It's an infinitely scalable resource.
lay more fiber add more routers, it gives you more bandwidth.
They don't really want to pay for it. At this point, telcos and network owners are literally prohibiting progress on the Internet.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Iridium!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I must be getting cynical reading ./ all day
Maquis196
The huge boom in internet video has led to doomsday scenarios of the internet running out of capacity.
So ... run QoS on the routers on each end?
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Let's all sing together:
"The last cable-laying boom was a scam; the last cable-laying boom was an enourmous scam. Who is Worldcom now?"
Yes, Qwest, Global Crossing (which is/was based in Bermuda - shock!) and others were involved as well, but Worldcom was my personal favorite of the bunch.
-Matt
As usual, the "journalist" seems to be conflating two different issues.
Yes, the last mile/local ISP is an issue for many people
Yes, the world/teleco's/googles may need more cross-continent fiber in order to provide network resiliency, increase service to under-served markets, increase capacity on intercontinental traffic, or provide alternate routes for competitive reasons.
Does solving one solve the other? NO.
If you tag stories with typos in the headline/summary, they quite often get corrected. This story is an example of that. It didn't take long either.
Why bother spending all this money on building infrastructure when you can just use download caps and tiered pricing to keep usage down? Problem solved!
Since there will be more undersea cables, there will be more cable cuts.
I hope the capacity calculations are adjusted for the bandwidth used to transmit conspiracy theories about the outages.
I have been hearing this for year,
but sorry there really is NO "doomsday scenarios of the internet running out of capacity" from video! I am really getting sick of hearing this.
Digital video is all or nothing, meaning it will play or it will not play. If you can't get enough bandwidth you net nothing! It's not like analog TV where the signal just gets degraded a bit but you can still watch it, on the net you just can't get it to play at all.
If it doesn't play most people will give up, get board and go away, back to there TV's or what ever they do and so the Internet doesn't die.
It self regulates where just a certain percentage of video is too crappy to play and people give up, and some start ups can't make their cheap crappy ISP's work and go bust.
It's not like everyone will just keep trying to use the video even when it's not working for them.
They will back off.
So far youtube hasn't brought down the Internet.
There are also many architectures that allow a company like youtube to bypass much of the backbones and so they will also not effect the performance of the Internet as much as you might think. I was calling this distributed servers, now called content distribution networks, but basically, you don't put up one massive server in one place but many server as close to the views as possible minimizing the distance the video packets must travel. Thereby using a little of the Internet as possible. So even QoS and these
cable-laying booms really aren't going to make any difference with video since most video doesn't go over International cables and can't use QoS unless your some large corporation paying for QoS on your H.323 Video Conferencing System.
In the end, any crying "doomsday scenarios" is like crying the sky is falling, they are just trying to grab headlines and should be treated like the idiots they are.
John L. Sokol
www.videotechnology.com
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
I can't comment on the new Cable being laid across Africa or the Middle east, but I have been following the situation in the Caribbean for a while. It really has taken off, with residential speeds in some countries going from 256kbps, to 2Mbps, to 6Mbps (at the same pricepoint) within the span for just a couple months. If you want a cool graphic showing the new fiber connections being made in the region, click the link below: http://nwncable.com/ Most of the reason for this happens to be in the "lucky" position the Caribbean finds itself in geologically. It's right between the US and South America, so as economies grow on both sides, lots of new cable gets laid in between. The new US-Colombia Expressway cable, for example, as increased capacity in Jamaica tremendously, with residential speeds approaching 15Mb/s for the equivalent of $40 US dollars. There is also quite a bit of fiber being run into the oil rich island of Trinidad in the Southern Caribbean. Shouldn't require too much explanation for that one.
Gnash has been ported to Play Station 3 and the latest version starts being able to play video.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"Anchors Aweigh" means that the anchor is free of the bottom.
Your trusty Quartermaster logs the event, and the ship is legally underway (should paint be traded with another vessel, and a trip to the "Long Green Table" ensue).
The command (in the US Navy, anyway) is "Let go the anchor", and the bosun trips the pelican hook (usually with a sledge hammer), a deafening roar ensues as the chain comes flying out of the chain locker, and everyone on the fo'c'sle has a religious experience.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I used to work for a company that was attempting to manufacture fiber-based AWG (Arrayed Waveguide Grating) devices back in about 2000. At that time, the fraction of fiber in the ground that was dark was thought to be about 99%. The devices we were testing were capable of multiplexing 16 channels together on to one fiber. The standard speed for a fiber link over single mode fiber is 2.5 Gbit/s, and a fiber link requires a pair of fibers, (for bi-directional traffic.. I suppose if you only wanted to send data one way, you could use a single one.) At that time, there were multiple competitors that had 40 channel devices based on some different technologies. When I stopped paying attention to what was available, 160 channel devices were being talked about and 80 channel devices were on the market. The cost of one of these AWGs was about $20k, (to buy as a customer, not the cost of production), and they have since come down in price by a large amount. You would need one on each end of the fiber. If we assume that 80 channel devices are available, and 1% of the fiber in the ground (the portion that was used) was 1 pair, then there were at least 8000 2.5 Gbit/s channels available in whatever segment of the network contained "99% dark fiber".
I haven't been able, in the last few minutes, to find stats on current backbone traffic levels, but I seriously doubt that the amount of potential long-haul fiber capacity is the reason for laying these cables. The only valid reasons I can see are that the existing ones are owned/controlled by entities that aren't cooperating or utilizing their cables very well or that redundancy is desired. The article states that Google is planning on running a cable from the US to Japan. I have to assume that this is more because the owners of existing cables are not cooperating. This might be the start of investment in a highly fractured network which does not have the redundancy that the internet was originally designed to provide.
One of the oddest blogs out there, but strangely compelling.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
experts believe that there is abundant amounts of 'dark fibre' lying unused in oceans across the world
Excuse me, but if they don't know and are guessing, what part of that makes them an expert? I guess techincally they could be paid for their opinion, but a more proper term here would be "soothsayer" or "mystic". There are people who know these things; I think the author was just too lazy to write a real article. Fluff piece? Yes.
moox. for a new generation.
I have to go to the supermarket, otherwise the doomsday scenario of a sandwich-less abode might come to pass.
On the way, I will need to buy gas to avoid the doomsday scenario of running out.
I hope I have avoided the doomsday scenario of appearing melodramatic.
Anyone else here used to use "laying cable" as a euphemism for taking a dump? (Which is a euphemism for defecation, for the non-native English speakers here.) If so, you'll probably share my surprise that such an increase in activity or "boom", if you will, could boost internet capacity.
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
Early this year Pakistan, Iran and parts of the mid-east lost international broadband when one or more undrseas cables were cut. It was unclear weather it was a natural disaster, saboage or industrial accident. Of course, many countries blamed their historic enemies for the alleged sabotage including the world's favorite Devil- the USA.
More fiber means more redundancy. But there are still vulnerable chokepoints.
Does supplying more bandwidth to the Caribbean mean that the MPAA will have to start trying to prevent Pirates of the Caribbean from being downloaded illegally by pirates in the Caribbean?
Being a computer scientist means you tell people how computers should work, not that you know how they actually work.
It would be interesting to know, how much extra length the oceanic floor cables get in order to account for plate tectonics (more specifically for divergent boundaries, like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge or East Pacific Rise?
Of course, the typical speed of plate movement being no more than 10 cm / year, I expect an answer to be in the order of thousands of years...
I know what we can do... we can use big-name telephone companies to launch huge investment ploys to raise huge sums for the promise of bringing on-demand hi-def video to desktops and houses. We can promise that "Every house and hotel room in the world could watch any movie or hear any video ever made." What's that... already been used to hoodwink ourselves and the investment masses? Darn. Well, there's always this device that can read SKU's and barcodes on any product and display its information on our computer screens. Everyone will love the instant coupons, manuals, recipes, etc. provided by this technology? What's that... Q-Cat... already been done to raise money? Dern.
This was a "Domesday" reference and as such it was apposite.
That should help make data transmissions more regular. ... ker-plunk
This might be the start of investment in a highly fractured network which does not have the redundancy that the internet was originally designed to provide.
thats what happens when you let monopolistic, politically manipulative corporations like at&t and similar to run critical infrastructure - you end up having to lay your own.
Read radical news here
your elaborately worded historical shot was not lost on me, at least. though i believe the book was finished in a year. so it cant be 1086.
Read radical news here
Given the $55 Verizon just charged me for making 18 minutes of calls to the UK, I'm not surprised they might see this as a cash cow.
(I'm unlikely to call overseas again soon, or I'd definitely be looking at cheaper methods.)
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Ok... So there is more capacity. But, if you ask an ISP, there is *ALWAYS* a critical shortage that they use to justify exhorbitant rate increases, a decrease in shortage, throttling, packet spoofing, service interruptions, false advertising ("unlimited" -this and that), and use PUBLIC money for PRIVATE gain ( i.e. using public funds to build something and then charge the public to use it).
Anyways, public funds are used to fud more advertising and bottom lines, rather than being used to actually USE lines. All ISPs do is shift government money around inside, and use the funds freed up by subsidies to fund executive perks, Congressional payoffs, and advertising (advertising for more space that they knowingly CAN'T handle, because they don't use it to build infrastructure).
There should be a system where the government actually buys the assets needed by the provider, rather than just handing them a bucket of cash and hope they use it for infrasturucture, and then returns the new infrastructure to the ISP *after* it has been built. That way, it can be ensured that the funds go for infrastructure. If the infrastructure paid for by the government is then sold off, the money goes back to the government, so providers can't flip it and profit off of publicly-paid for infrastructure.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
at a $1 per person why give to useless charities like World Vision when you could be funding cable.
Some people really need to sort out their priorities.
More cables going into oceans could be a great thing for an idea I have on oceanic internet cables.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
If you don't have enough bandwidth to watch digital video in real-time, you let it download first to a local buffer, then watch it.
Or had you forgotten that 50% of BitTorrent traffic is TV shows? Full-length, high-definition, 30+ Mbps movies over the internet are just as workable; it simply takes longer to buffer.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?