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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."
i assume it amounts to 90% of the fibre on earth...
They'd better be anchor-proof.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
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 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."
With all the spying going on, the less traffic that has to go through the states, the better.
What?
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?
"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!"