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Transpacific Unity Fiber Optic Cable Leaves Japan
JoshuaInNippon writes "The 10,000 km (6,200 mile) long Unity fiber optic cable, funded by Google and five East Asian communication companies, left Japanese shores on November 1st to be laid along the northern Pacific Ocean floor. The Japanese end of the cable is expected to be fused to the American end sometime around November 11th. The cable, which was announced in February of 2008 at a cost of around $300 million USD, has the theoretical capacity of 7.68 Tbps, but will be set at a capacity of about 4.8 Tbps (supposedly equivalent to about 75 million simultaneous phone calls) during its initial use. When Unity begins full operation sometime early next year, it is projected to increase internet traffic capacity between the two regions by over 20%, a wonderful boost to transpacific relations!"
Woohoo! Faster Hentai downloads :-)
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice - Grey's Law
this article gave me a real boast
"it is projected to increase internet traffic capacity between the two regions by over 20%, a wonderful boast to transpacific relations!"
That is until a ship drops anchor on top of it.
With all the crap that comes in via Asia, hacks SPAM, etc Maybe it would be better to cut the cables that are there now. I already null route most of china anyway.
Even fiber optic cable is getting laid...
So I've got a bunch of cable laying around, figure I'll run my own line from Japan to California. How does that work, exactly? I assume the cable is protected in some extremely strong waterproof and snag-proof sheath, but do they really just roll it off the ship, let it fall to the ocean floor, and there it sits? Do they have to occasionally throw a repeater overboard as well? I've always been curious how we're actually able to have these outrageously long cables under the sea and that it works, and works well enough that I believe cables are still the preferred method of data movement, with satellites being a distant second.
Sweet, this will give me faster access to Hulu, Slacker, and all of the nice American websites.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
For some reason 4.8 terabits/s doesn't sound like that much to me. Obviously it must be since it's boosting traffic by 20% but intuitively I would have imagined another 2 or 3 orders of magnitude for an inter-continental link.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
I can "lay" a "cable" faster than that...
You know how these things go. They will wake Godzilla by laying the cable, but later run into a mysterious mist cover island with a giant ape who will defeat the monster.
...but it would be nice to have the landings more widely distributed, especially on the US Atlantic coast.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
A faster and more direct tube to receive Chinese spam.
Asian bathroom pron, without buffering!
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Surely the firewalls and censorship that happens in China kind of defeats the purpose of faster connections between the Far East and the USA?
Will there be a ceremonial connection of a golden coupler when the cables meet in the middle?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Back in 1996 Neal Stephenson wrote a really excellent article, "Mother Earth Mother Board" in Wired. If you're curious about what it actually takes to wire the world it's a really excellent read.
Paged:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html
Single-page:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html
.: Max Romantschuk
That's a fair clip. No wonder fiber beats satellite. A ton of bandwidth, low latency and only ten days to install. A satellite must still take the better part of a day to install from launch at least.
Is that what this is for?
How much of that cost is the cable?
They better watch out while laying that cable or they're going to attract the Megalodon.
"The cable ... has the theoretical capacity of 7.68 Tbps, but will be set at a capacity of about 4.8 Tbps (supposedly equivalent to about 75 million simultaneous phone calls) during its initial use."
We've come a long way from copper telegraph lines.
Isn't that also what the bread companies keep trying to sell us?
it is projected to increase internet traffic capacity between the two regions by over 20%, a wonderful boost to transpacific relations!
Man, I hate those Japanese! And they hate us too!
(More internet bandwidth)
Suddenly we both love each other! Awww...
Comment of the year
More people who don't speak English will be on my team in L4D! That's great for teamwork, right?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
How many Library of Congress per second does it equal?
that firewall can be used 2 ways. While today, it keeps citizens from seeing the truth, what everybody is missing is that someday down the road, that same 'firewall' will be used to protect China, while they will launch massive cyber attacks against EU, Canada, US, Australia, Mexico, and the rest of the western nations.
And the cable will be full of BitTorrent traffic in 5..4..3...2.. There we go!
Upgrade time again!
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
Fantastic, now we'll see 20% more spam as a result of this too. Thanks Google.
Let's just hope this cable doesn't get run by any dolphins or whales, er I mean cows or chickens.
I think this is just Google's Glomar Explorer. I'm sure they are not interested at all to be mining all those data packets for intel. This is a complete altruistic - do no evil - venture to improve transatlantic relations
In related news, outsourcing from US to East Asia has increased by 20%!
surely using uncompressed telephone calls as a measure of bandwidth is a bit outdated? 4.8Tb is 75 million 64K uncompressed telephone calls. c'mon, get real!
Instead let's measure bandwidth by hdls units, 1 High Definition Lost Season is a pretty impressive measure of bandwidth, and by my reckoning 4.8Tb is about 100 hdls/second. That's a big pipe!
I can't wait for the job postings once this mother is turned up to full!
Looking forward to this here in Malaysia. Global Transit's HQ is just 200m from my house. When I see the truck pulling the final bit of cable wet and dripping from its long sea voyage, I'll slip the dudes a few bucks to tap a slice off for me.
Seriously, though, this is a country where almost all content of interest is foreign: unlike Japan or Thailand, say, there's no significant local-language content industry. Everyone reads English and/or Chinese and therefore skips straight past the homegrown small-potatoes sites, on to the major international sites (in fact I think most Americans would be surprised how well-integrated Malaysians are into the American view of the web). Every little bit of overseas capacity makes a big difference. Most Malaysian users' home broadband is capped to a measly maximum 4mbps because demand for bandwidth so far outstrips supply.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
The article submitter seems skeptical of 4.8 Tbps being 75 million simultaneous calls.
So is 4.8 Tbps really 75 million simultaneous phone calls? Let's do some simple calculations. If we want to go with exactly 4.8 Tbps we can say that's 480 OC-192 circuits. An OC-192 is equivalent to 192 DS3s. So that gives us 92,160 DS3s. Each DS3 carries 28 T1s. So that's 2,580,480 T1 circuits. Ignoring signaling channels and going with a standard DS0 signal of 64 kbps you have 24 channels per T1. Uh oh, that only gets us 61,931,520 voice circuits.
So where do we get 75 million from? Bad math actually, at least as far as any telecom geek is concerned. If you take 4,800,000,000,000 bps and divide that by 64,000 bps you get exactly 75,000,000. This is very simplified though no matter what the technology being used is. It ignores any overhead in framing and other signaling. Be it traditional telecom circuits like DS3s or packet type networks, you're always going to have overhead. You also need signaling channels to control your voice traffic (unless you want to be old school and use in-band MF or DTMF or something, but I digress). If that's SIP or SS7 or Q.931 ISDN D-channels, you're still taking up space with it.
I guess all this says is what most people on Slashdot probably already know. Bandwidth is just a number. What you can do with it is an entirely different question.
4.8Tb is about 100 hdls/second. That's a big pipe! Put it in units everyone can understand: 4.8Tbps is about 100 XXX DVDs per second!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Stop trolling, gawd!
Obviously someone is not very well read.
Lets keep the gold for ourselves.
I thought all these things went TO Japan, not from it. you know, Godzilla, Mothra, etc.
Have thay gotten pissed off enough that their sending out their own Transpacific Unity Fiber Optic Cable? Couldn't they have thought of a better and shorter name, like Transpa? It sounds like it doesn't even have atomic breath. What kind of a cheap monster is this, anyway?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Great, now the asians can kick my ass at mario kart with less impact on global bandwidth...
Does this mean we will upgrade to Haiku v2.0?
Are these dates real? The leave Japan on 1 November and get to the US by 11 November?! I waited 5 years for 1Mbps DSL in my neighborhood and that was only 20,000 feet from the CO, and these guys can move 4.8Tbps a thousand miles in 10 days?!
The cost is pretty good too. $300M is only 3/100 of 1% of the $787B stimulus package. I think Google got a much better deal all around that the American tax payer.
Has anyone a good link that explains, in some depth, how they do this? You have a ship (or more) and they haul the cable to the surface. OK. But what _exactly_ is involved?