$1.5 Billion: the Cost of Cutting London-Tokyo Latency By 60ms

MrSeb writes "Starting this summer, and thanks to the continuing withdrawal of Arctic sea ice, a convoy of ice breakers and specially-adapted polar ice-rated cable laying ships will begin to lay the first ever trans-Arctic Ocean submarine fiber optic cables. Two of these cables, called Artic Fibre and Arctic Link, will cross the Northwest Passage, which runs through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. A third cable, the Russian Optical Trans-Arctic Submarine Cable System (ROTACS), will skirt the north coast of Scandinavia and Russia. All three cables will connect the United Kingdom to Japan, with a smattering of branches that will provide high-speed internet access to a handful of Arctic Circle communities. The completed cables are estimated to cost between $600 million and $1.5 billion each. As it stands, it takes roughly 230 milliseconds for a packet to go from London to Tokyo; the new cables will reduce this by 30% to 170ms. The latency drop will mainly benefit algorithmic stock market traders, but other areas like education, telemedicine, and POTS will also enjoy the speed-up. Perhaps more importantly, almost every cable that lands in Asia goes through a choke point in the Middle East or the Luzon Strait between the Philippine and South China seas. If a ship were to drag an anchor across the wrong patch of seabed, billions of people could wake up to find themselves either completely disconnected from the internet or surfing with dial-up-like speeds. The three new cables will all come down from the north of Japan, through the relatively-empty Bering Sea. In addition, the Arctic Ocean, where each of the cables will run for more than 5,000 miles, is one of the least-trafficked parts of the world. That said, the cables will still have to be laid hundreds of meters below the surface to avoid the tails of roving icebergs."

Comments

Yay self-destruction

[billcopc]

"The latency drop will mainly benefit algorithmic stock market traders"

In other words, these cables will help machines ruin the global economy.

A part of me is kind-of glad they're speeding this up. We all know the system is destined to break, so the sooner that happens, the sooner people will wake the fuck up and demand change.

Re:Yay self-destruction

[isorox]

It's funny. But idiot's like the GP don't understand that speculators like me make money up and down in the market. I don't care one way or the other, I can make money in either direction.

For every cent you make, someone else loses it. You're like the sad people in vegas that spend their lives camped on the slots, the only difference is you gamble with other peoples money.

Re:Yay self-destruction

[bgarcia]

For every cent you make, someone else loses it.

Yes, because there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world in all of history, and nobody ever increases society's wealth, correct?

Re:Posting doesn't match up with the speed of ligh

[ModernGeek]

Yeah, but the packets have to be routed, and that takes time, too.

Why focus on Trading when we talk about latency?

[grelmar]

There are so many internet applications where low latency is a win. VOIP, remote systems management, two-way graphical applications that for various reasons are location sensitive (there's more of these types of apps then you realize - think proprietary software that would be either illegal or economically dangerous to physically locate outside of NA or the Eurozone, including geophysical analysis software for mining/oil exploration, among other things)...

There are lots of scientific applications where latency is critical.

But oh, that would be difficult to discuss. Much easier to relate everything to a vilify-able application.

Come on, for once, talk about the benefits of a mega infrastructure project.

Oh, right... Slashdot. My bad. That's just not what we do here.

Re:Neutrinos

[Michael Woodhams]

That would be from anywhere on Earth with a high intensity particle accelerator to anywhere on Earth with a huge particle detector buried hundreds of metres underground.