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

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21–30 of 74 posts

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

#21

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.

I can't find the article I read about this last year, but it's largely cultural. There is a greater expectation of information density in Japan, look at their advertising or TV news for example. Also, there is a severe paucity of Japanese (East Asian in general) web fonts so they're stuck with a lot of dated fonts from 25 years ago. Additionally there is just a different aesthetic there.

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

#22

I wonder what the difference is in the technology of the 3.3TB/s cable and the 60TB/c cable, just strands? (approx 20 more?)

Nope, the new fiber will be high dispersion compared to the old fiber and also will not have dispersion compensation along its length. The old cable was designed for OOK signaling. Previously optical signaling was 1 bit per symbol OOK (on-off-keying) and direct detection meaning you did not have any optical phase information to make dispersion corrections so the dispersion compensation was done in a specially designed fiber with the opposite sign slope for dispersion (DCF).

This fiber was also relatively high loss and has a narrower core which leads to higher nonlinearities in the link. The old cable tries to keep the dispersion within the range that OOK technologies can operate error-free (post FEC) so there's a lot of it typical at each repeater (EDFA). The newer coherent optical technology can transmit multiple bits per symbol (BPSK, QPSK) by encoding the bits in the optical phase. Since the phase is recovered at the receiver the dispersion accumulated in the fiber can be undone in DSP with a long enough FIR filter. So the need for dispersion compensation is gone with coherent optical. Taking out the DCF also reduces loss along the link reducing EDFA (amplifier) count and increasing spacing. Also nonlinear penalties on the newer higher dispersion fiber are lower which improves something called cycle slips that can punch through the FEC and cause you to take post-FEC errors.

The net result is that you should be able to transmit QPSK at 32GBd in 2 polarizations in maybe 80 waves in each direction.

2bits x 2 polarizations x 32G ~128Gb/s per wave or nearly 11Tb/s for 1 fiber. If this cable has 6 strands, then it could easily meet the target transmission capacity.

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

#23

I 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 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.

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

#24

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.

I came back from Japan last month. It's cultural.

A lot of stuff the Japanese do is from "back in the day" and there's a lot of group think that goes on there.

There's also not as much of a great sense of entrepreneurship or critical thinking going on there. Most people are like zombie's - wake up, get dressed, work until 7 or 8pm, take the subway or JR home, smoke or drink, socialize, repeat.

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

#25

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.

I've been told that the main devices that are used to browse the internet in Japan are mobiles (smartphones). That results in the websites being built for mobile users instead of desktops.

I'm not sure if this is true though.

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

#26

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.

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

#27

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.

Here is my (limited) understanding:

A significant amount of internet use in Japan is via feature phones, with smart phones only catching on in the last few years. This limits the complexity of what can be displayed quite a bit. Similarly, the Japanese market tends to be significantly older than the rest of the world (http://www.statista.com/statistics/276045/age-distribution-o...) and resistance to change.

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

#28

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.

> by Neal Stephenson

Well ok then

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

#29
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

no, the title is accurate. it says "Google invests in $300mm cable", not "Google invests $300mm in cable"

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

#30

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.

Though if they could run it to New Zealand, it would certainly help to have competition with the SCC here...
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