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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."

8 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. Paging Neal Stephenson? by Gothmolly · · Score: 4, Funny

    Didn't I read a book about this?

    --
    I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
  3. Look on the bright side. by jd · · Score: 5, Funny

    If they want to move all Facebook traffic off the regular Internet and build a separate infrastructure for it, maybe we can get all the Facebook users to migrate entirely over to Internet 3 and leave everyone else alone.

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  4. Re:Investing in wireless by msauve · · Score: 4, Funny

    Without wires, obviously. How hard can it be to not install wires?

    --
    "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
  5. 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.
  6. Facebook's Strategy by andersh · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is all part of Facebook's new strategy.

    Facebook will be building a huge new data center in northern Sweden to support the rapid global growth of its users. The new data center in Lulea, Sweden will be Facebook’s first facility outside the United States.

    “It’s the next step in our ongoing strategy of building our own infrastructure and moving away from leased facilities,” said Facebook spokesman Michael Kirkland. “We are expecting this data center to continue to help us reduce latency for our users in Europe and beyond.”

    http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/10/27/facebook-goes-global-with-data-center-in-sweden/

  7. 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).