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TIME DotCom and Facebook Invest In Massive Undersea Internet Cable Project

Posted by timothy on from the also-recovering-cold-war-alien-artifacts dept.

MojoKid writes "This week, TIME dotCom (out of Malaysia) has entered into a construction and maintenance agreement of the Asia Pacific Gateway (APG) submarine cable system connecting Malaysia to Korea and Japan. The APG is a 10,000 km international fibre optic cable system that will link Malaysia to Korea and Japan with seven branches to other Asian countries. The cable system is scheduled to be ready in quarter three of 2014. TIME is leading up the process, but Facebook as well as a few others are joining in by combining $450 million to the cause."

4 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. Facebook investors by hey · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I bet Facebook IPO investors didn't know they were investing in this.

    1. Re:Facebook investors by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I guarantee Facebook isn't doing it as a charity operation.

      They expect to get a return on their investment. Facebook might be ripping off their stock holders in general, (ha! might! I crack myself up), but you can count on them to never betray their stockholders by donating to charity!

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  2. unh-un by PopeRatzo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm just not comfortable with Facebook owning a trans-oceanic cable. There's just no good reason that they should own any infrastructure that crosses international borders and territorial waters.

    I also don't want Google to own the Clouds and Apple to own the Moon.

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  3. Networks Of Necessity by andersh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's a sound strategic move for any large content and service provider including Google, Apple and especially Facebook.

    They rely on the networks for their revenue, it makes sense to own parts of this infrastructure yourself if you can afford it. If only to use as leverage and/or offsetting future increases in transport costs. Owning huge datacenters is not enough, any longer, for the very large scale, global enterprises.

    The [network] owners have already begun asking companies such as Facebook to pay for their users' data usage. The European ISPs and telecom corporations asked earlier this year for the right to offer "better" service levels to paying clients such as Facebook (i.e. Network Neutrality).