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Google Invests in $300M Submarine Cable to Improve Connection Between Japan, US

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Re: Google Invests in $300M Submarine Cable to Improve Connection Between Japan, US

#31

I say this without any knowledge of the profitability of such a venture, and as someone who does not live in Australia but who is familiar with the running joke that they have poor Internet: How about run a new cable, or two, to Australia?

From what I understand, Australia's poor internet service is more due to poor ISPs and government meddling than the quality or quantity of the backbone.

The cables are pretty limited in both number and capacity. Just compare Australia with Japan for example: http://www.cablemap.info/

Re: Google Invests in $300M Submarine Cable to Improve Connection Between Japan, US

#32
post #14
post #4

That 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.

[deleted]

Re: Google Invests in $300M Submarine Cable to Improve Connection Between Japan, US

#33

On 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.

Same reason they still love fax machines:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the-fa...

It's a cultural preference

Re: Google Invests in $300M Submarine Cable to Improve Connection Between Japan, US

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fibe…

Nope this will be 100G per wave not 40G. 40G was a stop-gap technology that never really shipped in large volume. With the advent of coherent optical, everyone just went to 100G (eg. Infinera, Ciena, Alcatel-Lucent) EDIT: One caveat, depending on a particular link many of these systems will run at half-rate. A lot of legacy cables today are running BPSK at 50G in 2 waves (25G/wave) due to nonlinearities.

> Nope this will be 100G per wave not 40G.

Do you have a link for this? Interesting news if true. Also: Things running at 50G used to be OC768 with error correction, ie 40G of data + 10G of overhead. Has this changed? At some point, the framers have to deal with standardized bitstreams, so is the 50G one part of an inverse mux or combined up from 10G?

Edit: It's been a while. Sorry for the bazillion questions, but curiousity is getting the better of me. Are folks really running 100G coherent undersea currently?

Re: Google Invests in $300M Submarine Cable to Improve Connection Between Japan, US

#35

Obligatory 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.

I had never read this. Amazing article. Thank you.

Re: Google Invests in $300M Submarine Cable to Improve Connection Between Japan, US

#36

I say this without any knowledge of the profitability of such a venture, and as someone who does not live in Australia but who is familiar with the running joke that they have poor Internet: How about run a new cable, or two, to Australia?

Why would they? The less BW they got, the more expensive it is, ergo more gauging and more profit.

Building infrastructure knowing that every single user has a transfer cap inside YOUR OWN NETWORK is a dream come true for every ISP.

Re: Google Invests in $300M Submarine Cable to Improve Connection Between Japan, US

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand, Australia's poor internet service is more due to poor ISPs and government meddling than the quality or quantity of the backbone.

The cables are pretty limited in both number and capacity. Just compare Australia with Japan for example: http://www.cablemap.info/

Poor inter continental connections dont explain data caps INSIDE their uber fiber national network, do they?

Re: Google Invests in $300M Submarine Cable to Improve Connection Between Japan, US

#38

On 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.

Japanese are very egocentric and insular.

There was a story on Hackaday about Japanese Hackers simply ignoring English speaking part of the internet. Those are Hackers hacking on something in a Hackerspace, people on the forefront of open minded thinking.

Re: Google Invests in $300M Submarine Cable to Improve Connection Between Japan, US

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope this will be 100G per wave not 40G. 40G was a stop-gap technology that never really shipped in large volume. With the advent of coherent optical, everyone just went to 100G (eg. Infinera, Ciena, Alcatel-Lucent) EDIT: One caveat, depending on a particular link many of these systems will run at half-rate. A lot of legacy cables today are running BPSK at 50G in 2 waves (25G/wave) due to nonlinearities.

> Nope this will be 100G per wave not 40G. Do you have a link for this? Interesting news if true. Also: Things running at 50G used to be OC768 with error correction, ie 40G of data + 10G of overhead. Has this changed? At some point, the framers have to deal with standardized bitstreams, so is the 50G one part of an inverse mux or combined up from 10G? Edit: It's been a while. Sorry for the bazillion questions, but cu…

See for example: http://newswire.telecomramblings.com/2013/01/telstra-global-...

So you have to separate the "wet" plant from the terminal gear. The speed of the terminal gear is completely disconnected from the wet plant these days. Nobody replaces wet plant to upgrade capacity. They run Ciena, Infinera, Alcatel gear over Tyco's old line system.

Essentially the issue with upgrading over the wet plant is basically the presence of nonlinearities on the fiber. The links are not noise limited. Some of these fibers are still running 10G OOK in half the band and that on NZ-DSF that's used for submarine cables basically causes huge nonlinear penalties. The new subsea fiber is 22ps/nm-km and essentially larger effective diameter for reducing nonlinear penalty.

http://www.corning.com/opticalfiber/products/vascade_fibers....

BTW, I also worked at BBN

Re: Google Invests in $300M Submarine Cable to Improve Connection Between Japan, US

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand, Australia's poor internet service is more due to poor ISPs and government meddling than the quality or quantity of the backbone.

The cables are pretty limited in both number and capacity. Just compare Australia with Japan for example: http://www.cablemap.info/

Australia has 20 million people and is at the 'end of the line'. Japan has 100 million people, and just behind it (from the US side) are the twin internet powerhouses of South Korea and China.
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