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Google and Facebook Are Building the Fastest Trans-Pacific Cable Yet (techcrunch.com)
Google and Facebook are working together to lay a nearly 8,000-mile fiber-optic cable between Los Angeles and Hong Kong. The cable will have a bandwidth of 120 terabits per second, Google said, adding that this makes it the highest-capacity route between the United States and Asia. TechCrunch adds: Once the new 12,800 km cable is at full capacity, it'll be the highest-capacity trans-Pacific cable yet. Until now, that record was held by the FASTER cable, which Google also has a stake in. Google tells TechCrunch that all parties participating in building the cable will have their own portion of the cable and that the company will have its own fiber pair to keep its own traffic private. The new cable will become the sixth submarine cable that Google has a stake in (the others are Unity, SJC, FASTER, MONET and Tannat). While it may seem unusual for Google to partner with Facebook on this kind of project, submarine cables often feature these kind of partnerships. Facebook and Microsoft recently teamed up to build a trans-Atlantic cable, for example, which at 160 Tbps is even faster than the Pacific Light cable (but also only half as long). Amazon, too, is starting to invest in its own submarine cables, but so far, the company has not partner with other industry giants to do so.
Thumbs up!
so sad
can't break the laws of physics, boys and girls, not even facebook and google combined can do that.
... this is dogs and cats lying down together.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
ALL YOUR PACKETS ARE BELONG TO NSA
Because Google.
And Facebook.
I have found a way around the lameness filter, but the code is too big to fit in this margine
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The length of the cable is 12,800 km.
The speed of light is 300,000 km/sec.
The velocity factor of fiber is about 68%.
The data rate of the cable is 120e12 bits/sec.
The amount of time that the data stays in the cable is 12,800 km / (300,000 km/sec * 0.68) = 62.7 milliseconds. Multiplying that by the data rate of 120e12 bits per second yields about eight terabits or one terabyte. That is the amount of data "stored" in the cable, at any instant, during transit.
It's not much of an addition to the Google/Facebook data cosmoplex, but it is solid state, liquid cooled, highly distributed and largely immune from fires and small meteor strikes.
Private? Ahahahaaaaaaaaaaa
US gov will be tapping the LA end. China will take the Hong Kong side. And a mysterious dredging accident will mark when the Russkies tap somewhere in the middle.
They don't generate the traffic, the users do when they request content, be it videos or webpages.
And the users are already being charged.
Are you telling me cable companies arent making a profit?
Just think of the DDOS that will be possible with a trans-Pacific pipe this large! All for Facebook/Google? Sigh.
Lol. Just in case anyone is taking this seriously:
* Comcast's most recently completed year completed with $8.2B in net income. More than 10% of revenue. That's a lot, they surely are not restricted from investing in physical infrastructure
* Charging by the byte is not a complaint of net neutrality supporters. However this is a problem if certain bytes are charged but others aren't.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
1. Cable and Telcos not making enough money: HAHAHA hahaha ahahhahha heeeheeheee Heh. Oh, were you being serious?
2. Apparently Google, Facebook, etc. are fine with laying their own undersea cable, as this story is about them doing exactly that. What have you got a problem with again?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Imagine the increase in simultaneous hacking attempts that can be made with this new cable!
This one is so fast that the NSA taps are already integrated before laying the cable. That's like, time traveling fast.
Apparently the joke is on me; Zuckerberg apparently wants 'FacebookNet' to be a real thing.
Now, how can we stop this? The internet is bad enough as-is, the direction it's been going, we don't need 'Internet 2.0' to be 'FacebookNet', when the first paragraph of the EULA will say something on the order of "You consent to 100% monitoring of 100% of every packet data sent or received over FacebookNet".
An 8,000-mile fiber-optic cable between Los Angeles and Hong Kong? That's not good enough. You'd get a latency of at least 60ms before even taking all the repeaters into account - that's technically good enough to play games over, but you'd still be at a distinct competitive disadvantage against people playing on the same side of the cable as the server. I demand that they build a 4,000-mile fiber-optic cable between Los Angeles and Hong Kong instead, so that we get decent ping.
must flow!
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra