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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...
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.
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.
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?
...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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
"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!"
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...