Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Subsea Cable to Connect Asia, Europe, and North America Through the Arctic

cinia.fi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 67 posts

Re: Subsea Cable to Connect Asia, Europe, and North America Through the Arctic

#21

Post by jsjohnst »

mhandley wrote: post #18
PeterisP wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason for a subsea cable latency to be worse than starlink, both don't go in the straightest line possible but close to that.

Starlink gets the speed of light in a vaccuum, which is roughly 50% faster than the speed of light in glass.

Fiber gets closer to the speed of light, even when accounting for retransmission delays, than just 50%. The index of refraction for glass is commonly quoted as 1.5. That makes it 33%. Also, Starlink isn’t vacuum speeds either (unless you are talking about the inter satellite laser links and not the downlink to CPE, which even they I’m not sure operate at full “speed of light in a vacuum”).

Re: Subsea Cable to Connect Asia, Europe, and North America Through the Arctic

#22

Post by jsmith99 »

throwbigdata wrote: post #19

One decision a lot of people did a few years ago was every network link outside of the data center must be encrypted. Not sure I’d be comfortable putting something on Chinese fiber anyway, but I believe that for them to unencrypt they would need tailored operations or significantly better decryption technology that I am familiar with.

Cinia is not based in China. It seems to be owned by the Finnish government.

Re: Subsea Cable to Connect Asia, Europe, and North America Through the Arctic

#23

Post by dustintrex »

jvmiert wrote: post #6

For anyone curious, there's an image of the route in this article: https://www.aroged.com/2021/12/24/far-north-digital-and-cini...

Interesting. I naively expected it to take the shortest/great circle route from Europe straight across northern Russia to Japan, but no, it actually loops the other way around the pole via Iceland and Canada.

Re: Subsea Cable to Connect Asia, Europe, and North America Through the Arctic

#24

Post by zamadatix »

jsjohnst wrote: post #21
mhandley wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starlink gets the speed of light in a vaccuum, which is roughly 50% faster than the speed of light in glass.

Fiber gets closer to the speed of light, even when accounting for retransmission delays, than just 50%. The index of refraction for glass is commonly quoted as 1.5. That makes it 33%. Also, Starlink isn’t vacuum speeds either (unless you are talking about the inter satellite laser links and not the downlink to CPE, which even they I’m not sure operate at full “speed of light in a vacuum”).

The refractive index is only one part of the story, light does not follow a straight path through fiber it bounces around. I'd assume this to be about the newer inter-sattelite links as comparing fiber to fiber plus some seems obvious.

Re: Subsea Cable to Connect Asia, Europe, and North America Through the Arctic

#25

Post by dghughes »

mhandley wrote: post #18
PeterisP wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no reason for a subsea cable latency to be worse than starlink, both don't go in the straightest line possible but close to that.

Starlink gets the speed of light in a vaccuum, which is roughly 50% faster than the speed of light in glass.

From what I understand Starlink satellites do not communicate between each other yet, maybe that's outdated info. I know there will be inter-sat comm eventually. But they are 500km in altitude and the atmosphere is 100km so they only have about 400km of vacuum from obit to Earth stations. So it's a 1,000km round trip and then through ground stations, fibre cabling.

Re: Subsea Cable to Connect Asia, Europe, and North America Through the Arctic

#26

Post by Overtonwindow »

I’ve never quite been able to understand from a technical perspective, but from a Geo political perspective, is why we can’t cut China off from western Internet? A better diplomatic sanction would be to block all Chinese internet traffic.

Re: Subsea Cable to Connect Asia, Europe, and North America Through the Arctic

#27

Post by FridayoLeary »

Overtonwindow wrote: post #26

I’ve never quite been able to understand from a technical perspective, but from a Geo political perspective, is why we can’t cut China off from western Internet? A better diplomatic sanction would be to block all Chinese internet traffic.

First of all, nobody will ever introduce any meaningful sanctions against China ever. There are a whole variety of practical and political reasons why not. Also, from what i understand, China is already extremely busy cutting their citizens off from the rest of the internet. (i know this isn't exactly what you meant, but still...)

Re: Subsea Cable to Connect Asia, Europe, and North America Through the Arctic

#28

Post by xiii1408 »

nnx wrote: post #8

By how much will it improve latency between EU and Asia? or US and Asia?

Unfortunately probably none, unless you live pretty far north. We're pretty close to the speed of light limit* when it comes to latency between the US and Asia, which makes sense as a straight line is over the Pacific anyway. (e.g., I get ~1.1x the theoretical min latency pinging Tokyo from my Fiber connection in the SF Bay Area)

Where it seems like we're pretty far from the theoretical min is connections within the continental US. Latency is pretty bad (e.g. I get like 1.5x - 4x the theoretical min latency from my Fiber connection in the SF Bay Area, depending on endpoint). I assume part of this is indirect connections (you don't have a direct fiber connection between every pair of cities, because that would be dumb) and some of it is routing overhead (a connection to Asia goes a long distance, but often has way fewer hops).

Note that this is theoretical min latency based on the speed of light through fiber*, which is a bit higher than (about 5/3x) the speed of light through air. New fiber optic tech might help this at some point.

Re: Subsea Cable to Connect Asia, Europe, and North America Through the Arctic

#29

Post by nradov »

asimpletune wrote: post #7
asimpletune wrote: post #2

I wonder if melting ice is making this easier to do or more economically feasible than it has been in the past?

Also - totally unrealistic - but what if the ice freezed again, making the cables impermeable to spying and ushering in some kind of golden era of diplomacy and trust. I remember reading that in times when technology favored defense there were widespread moments of peace throughout Europe, like in the Middle Ages, so this could be something like that.

Spying by tapping into unencrypted traffic on undersea cables was done briefly during the Cold War. Now governments encrypt all their traffic so you won't get anything useful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells?wprov=sfla...

Re: Subsea Cable to Connect Asia, Europe, and North America Through the Arctic

#30

Post by fennecfoxen »

dustintrex wrote: post #23
jvmiert wrote: post #6

For anyone curious, there's an image of the route in this article: https://www.aroged.com/2021/12/24/far-north-digital-and-cini...

Interesting. I naively expected it to take the shortest/great circle route from Europe straight across northern Russia to Japan, but no, it actually loops the other way around the pole via Iceland and Canada.

Looks like there would be fewer opportunities to stop and connect to existing networks if you went that way.
Post reply on HN