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Google Is Backing a New $300 Million High-Speed Internet Trans-Pacific Cable
An anonymous reader writes Google has announced it is backing plans to build and operate a new high-speed internet Trans-Pacific cable system called "FASTER." In addition to Google, the $300 million project will be jointly managed by China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI, and SingTel, with NEC as the system supplier. FASTER will feature the latest high-quality 6-fiber-pair cable and optical transmission technologies. The initial design capacity is expected to be 60Tb/s (100Gb/s x 100 wavelengths x 6 fiber-pairs), connecting the US with two locations in Japan.
they can do worse than making us a nice fat pipe for quality anime and JAV
60Tb/s is fine for me, but what about the other people who want to use it?
Or at least I assume so, given how much this would benefit the NSA.
The cable will never leave beta and then be discontinued in a year.
Nope.
In C++, your friends can see your privates.
You'd think that since the sheathing probably costs more than the fiber, and the labor/paperwork/engineering involved in laying it probably dwarfs the equipment cost, they'd put in a lot more than 6 pair.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that there was plenty of undersea cable that's under-utilized or sitting dark.
Don't we keep inventing new ways to send orders of magnitude more data through the same old fibers? Isn't this the reason of the original WorldCom market collapse? Isn't this still the case, and there is tons of dark fiber and bandwidth available?
I doubt this makes any economic sense, so I'm just suspicious that Google just wants to own and snoop more traffic.
Google ... China Telecom Global ... KDDI ... SingTel
Does that suggest at least 4 countries with NSA-like taps into the data.
I'd rather Google come in and bust the telecom monopoly in my home town where I have a choice between Verizon FiOS and Comcast Xfinity ... if you want to call that a choice. The lesser of the evils is Verizon FiOS. At least the FiOS is truly fiber optic!
The Chinese will be able to hack us 100 times faster.
Why are you so confident they don't already have it?
Between spies infiltrating endpoints and fiber-tapping subs (If the US has one, which they do, China almost certainly does too), it's best to assume all data is or can be captured in transit and focus on end-to-end encryption.
I'm not sure if I'd rather have the NSA spying on my or China trying to steal my intellectual property.
I don't believe this is an either/or situation.
#DeleteChrome
I doubt that you're worth spying on. I also doubt if you own any intellectual property of any value.
People here tend to think they're much more important and interesting than they actually are.
Isn't China doing missile tests toward Japan right now? Why the %$@#%$@ would Japan let China have anything to do with connecting them to this new network?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Neal Stephenson's utterly fantastic essay on the subject (all 42,000 words of it) for Wired
I can't argue against faster-loading pregnant furry futanari tentacle porn.
Did I miss any fetishes?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
yes this weird niche one where there are women having sex.
I believe Google just fired a salvo into the Net Neutrality war.
Comcast et all: Hey content providers, it'd be a real shame if your speeds got real slow. A real shame. Howsa about some protection money, y'know just in case?
Google: Gee Comcast, seems your connection the the rest of the world is awfully slow, might be we just bypass you altogether...
Seems sort of like Backbone VS Last Mile: Fight!
At the very least a bit of future hedging going on. Google also has last mile service in a few areas. Imagine if they also own FASTER backbone infrastructure as well. Competition probably sucks if your not used to it.
I know that article is old as shit because I had a subscription to Wired when it came out. Fantastic stuff, though.
I just finished reading Snow Crash again last week. I almost never re-read books, but that's a classic. It was written in 1992 and set 20 to 25 years in the future, AKA right about now. The reason that Facebook purchased Oculus is because they want to basically create the Metaverse.
Seems they could just run it from Alaska to Russia. Wouldn't even lose sight of the ship laying the cable.
From the announcement in the quoted article:
"A consortium of six global companies announced that they have signed commercial agreements to build and operate a new Trans-Pacific cable system to be called “FASTER” (...) The six-company consortium is comprised of China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, Google, KDDI and SingTel."
The OP gives the wrong idea that Google backs up the project and the others are involved only in management, which seems incorrect from the original announcement in NEC's page.
Then I can reach Comcast's data cap in, what, 5 or 6 milliseconds.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
you think that's weird, they even have bizarre specially named sub-genre of that kind where material is deposited in the women's tract at conclusion of sexual activities by the male.
I'm not sure if I'd rather have the NSA spying on my or China trying to steal my intellectual property.
I don't believe this is an either/or situation.
And if you're not sure what that means, Google "double penetration"... but maybe not at work.
Then again, with Google in the mix it will be "triple penetration"...
bottom line is everyone will have your data and you will be screwed, like now but faster!
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
... the NSA ... what could possibly go wrong?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
So is it even worth it for governments to tap undersea cables? It is easy to negate the attack using end-to-end encryption. The sub also has to have the capability to record and store terabytes worth of information a second. I don't know of any recording device capable of that.
CATCHA: intent
Actually, all the sub has to be able to do is take the data and feed it back into the fiber with different destination addresses. Which means that the sub doesn't even have to stick around after pulling off the intercept. This DOES mean that the next group to intercept the data gets to see a whole bunch of encrypted (or not) data flowing to a mystery address, however.
Yes, A LOT. I'm not sure of the rule number, but the minute you think you've listed all fetishes you didn't actually get them all.
Loli, Vore, TS, transformation, gassy, and on and on and on.
Once again, scifi leads the way.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Nothing new considering William Gibson wrote Neuromancer in the 1980s.
I believe they have accepted the "if you want the cable to be able to actually connect to anything in the US, you need to let us splice this box into the cable" proposition by the NSA.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Yeah, break into an optical network timed to the nanosecond without triggering any alarms? They (THE "they") can't even snoop a line without the operators finding out. A 2dB loss in power for a tap would be obvious. Well, unless they set up a machine that bent the fiber at 2 degrees per day, for 90 days. Most of the non-destructive ("hidden" or "secret" taps) pick up light leakage. But a 2-3 dB drop from a sudden bend for the tap, and the monitoring systems will set off alarms. Some can even locate the bend from dispersion and reflections (designed to find breaks, but sensitive enough to find the bends of a non-destructive tap). But bend it slowly over many days, and the "damage" will look like a problem with the line, perhaps a water incursion. Likely, before you start setting off power loss alarms, they'll re-set the alarm thresholds. Best if you had someone on the inside to report the actions in relation to the slow power loss. But blindly bending it over a 90 day period would likely get you a tap with nobody realizing it was a tap. But tap it in 10 seconds, and they'll have a "non-destructive tap alarm" go off. No really, some equipment has that built in.
But a destructive tap, like the parent suggests, will never go unnoticed.
Learn to love Alaska
I have no idea what I'm talking about here, but could the tap be applied while they're still laying the cable? I mean, at some point a ship with a coil of cable sets off from the US, unreeling the cable as it goes. Once it's a couple of kilometers away, the NSA sends in the sub and applies the tap before the ship's even got over the horizon. Presumably that'd work, wouldn't it? Or do they have the cable lit with some sort of test data while they're laying it?
Why the fuck does everyone think this is actually going to be used for internet traffic?
Sure, part of the China Mobile side of things might be used for peering, I'd be shocked if any more than 5% of this capacity was going to be used for internet peering.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
1984. That's actually one of the only other books I've read multiple times.
The details of the Snow Crash version will probably be much closer to what Facebook ends up building.
Napatech is way too expensive.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
That was one of the thoughts I had; the other was: the actual cable would be crazy to tap, but they don't have to. Instead of tapping all of the fiber strands sheathed in the power cable, why not just dip in at the boost point? You get a momentary power fluctuation which affects the entire service, and then everything goes back online -- with the booster replaced by a destructive intercept. To the remote telemetry, it reads like a temporary boost anomaly, when really it's an intercept.
You don't need to be undetectable when you can provide some sort of reason for the anomaly (anchor a large boat in the region for example). You just need to be explainable as something less nefarious.
Or, since you've got the theoretical sub, you could just slowly bend the cable over 90 days as the gp said; but then you'd need to have some sort of transmitter to attach or have a huge local storage system on the sub.
Including the junction point during the cable lay makes much more sense.
I have no idea what I'm talking about here, but could the tap be applied while they're still laying the cable?
In practice, the tap would go in without a problem, but the diagnostics at either end would detect a problem with the cable and give an approximate location Then it's up to the operator whether they want to accept a known damaged cable, or pay to investigate the "damage" before going live. It's possible they'd look for a rebate from the cable manufacturer, and just light it up. But I've not seen anything indicating any cable was "lightly damaged" and put into service. The liklihood that "damage" would get worse and lead to failure would be too high.
Learn to love Alaska
Add that to conspiracy theories, and the cable cuts in the middle east were not from sloppy sailors, but US agents cutting the cable so a tap could be installed elsewhere undetected.
Because if you do actually cut the cable (with a boat anchor, near shore), then you can do whatever you want with it in the middle and nobody would notice.
Learn to love Alaska
Hence why it's all theoretical.
Learn to love Alaska
This is the direction I was going, but I'm not sure it's actually true -- the other end of the cable will still have access to all telemetry in the boosters and sheathe right up to the booster prior to the cut, won't it? Anyone with more experience with these cables willing to weigh in here?