A sensor array along the cable line monitoring marine health would yield a data goldmine.
Google Invests in $300M Submarine Cable to Improve Connection Between Japan, US
11–20 of 74 posts
Re: Google Invests in $300M Submarine Cable to Improve Connection Between Japan, US
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you read the article you would see that they are one of a number of partners. The project costs several billion US$. By 'buying in' like this you are given a dedicated portion of the bandwidth to use.
The NEC press release says the total amount of investment across six different companies is approximately $300mm
You're right. The press release [0] does say "The total amount of investment for the FASTER system is estimated to be approximately USD $300 million". That would, however, make the title of this article wrong.
I'm surprised Techcrunch made that big a mistake in their reporting.
[0] http://www.nec.com/en/press/201408/global_20140811_01.html
Re: Google Invests in $300M Submarine Cable to Improve Connection Between Japan, US
#13Obligatory link to "Mother Earth, Motherboard" whenever submarine cables are mentioned:
http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html
Best 50 page article you'll read this year.
Re: Google Invests in $300M Submarine Cable to Improve Connection Between Japan, US
#14That seems really cheap for such a crucial piece of infrastructure that has to wrap a quarter of the way around the earth
While manufacturing the cable is expensive, actually laying it (in that particular part of the ocean) is not that challenging. They essentially just drive a ship along that path while slowly spooling out the cable from the rear. They have the advantage that that stretch of ocean doesn't contain much of anything to plan around.
Re: Google Invests in $300M Submarine Cable to Improve Connection Between Japan, US
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you read the article you would see that they are one of a number of partners. The project costs several billion US$. By 'buying in' like this you are given a dedicated portion of the bandwidth to use.
The NEC press release says the total amount of investment across six different companies is approximately $300mm
Facscinating, so now I'm completely confused. If they can pull this cable for 300M$US total that is a huge improvement in costs from previous efforts. Now I feel compelled to track down what changed that made this an order of magnitude less costly to do.
EDIT: this link http://submarinenetworks.com/systems/trans-pacific/unity informs me that I am completely wrong on the costs. Apparently it is really "only" 300M$ to lay a cable from here to there.
Re: Google Invests in $300M Submarine Cable to Improve Connection Between Japan, US
#16Anyone want to take a guess at Google's motive (other than goodwill)? Better access to East Asian customers?
Re: Google Invests in $300M Submarine Cable to Improve Connection Between Japan, US
#17Obligatory link to "Mother Earth, Motherboard" whenever submarine cables are mentioned: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html Best 50 page article you'll read this year.
This really makes me nostalgic.
I miss the days when Wired actually had decent content.
Re: Google Invests in $300M Submarine Cable to Improve Connection Between Japan, US
#18Anyone want to take a guess at Google's motive (other than goodwill)? Better access to East Asian customers?
> This will get it pretty close to the company’s data center in The Dalles, Ore., and give that facility a better connection to Japan.
That seems like enough to me.
Re: Google Invests in $300M Submarine Cable to Improve Connection Between Japan, US
#19I wonder what the difference is in the technology of the 3.3TB/s cable and the 60TB/c cable, just strands? (approx 20 more?)
That jumped out at me too. My wild guess is that the older fiber is a 10G system, the new one is 40G.
From [1] > Unity cable system consists of eight fiber pairs, has design capacity up to 7.68 Tbps, with each fiber pair operating at 96x10G DWDM system.
From [2] > the SJC cable system consists of 6 fiber pairs with the initial design capacity of 28 terabits per second,
Taking a guess that there are 96x40Gb/s x 6 fibers gets you to 23 Tb/s, so in the right ballpark. (Wavelength spacing on a fiber is different between 40G and 10G, so this is a bit of a shot in the dark.)
Caveat: 40G used to be near and dear to my heart (Big Bear Networks), so everything pretty much looks like that nail to my hammer.
[1] http://submarinenetworks.com/systems/trans-pacific/unity [2] http://www.globe.com.ph/press-room/globe-regional-connectivi...
Re: Google Invests in $300M Submarine Cable to Improve Connection Between Japan, US
#20On a slight offtopic note, I wonder why Japanese websites are still stuck in the mid 90s to early year 2000 style. One example of this is the imageboard type of websites, which interestingly enough has caught on here in the US.
I wonder if these better connectivity will bring more cross culture web designs or applications to both places.