91–100 of 262 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You gotta bore for that sweet latency win. A chord tunnel between San Francisco and Hong Kong would save 1300 miles (20% improvement right there), and if you drill it straight enough, you won't even need a cable.
Need to have lava shields for that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"What is the cost of doing something like this?" Their Oregon to Japan cable, 9000km and laid in 2016, cost $300M. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2939316/googles-60tbps...
That is at least 1 order of magnitude cheaper than I would have guessed. Mind boggling that it's cheaper to do that then buy like the 4th best meal delivery app in Canada or whatever.
1. For the deep ocean parts of the route, cables and associated equipment (such as repeaters) are simply spooled out from the back of the cable laying ship, to settle on the ocean floor.
2. For shallow waters, the cable is buried. This is done by dragging a plow along the bottom which cuts a furrow and puts the cable into it. The plow has an altitude control and a camera so that an operator on the ship can control it, and a magnetometer to check if the cable is properly buried behind it.
3. For areas where burying isn't practical but they anticipate ships will anchor, they use armored cable.
For #1, the costs are going to be the cost to operate the ship while it slowly spools out the cable and the cost of the cable. For #3, same thing, but with more expensive cable. For #2 I'd expect it is similar, except the ship goes a lot slower (about 0.5 knots when using the plow, compared to about 5 knots when laying surface cable).
Finally, there is this.
#4. At the shores, they need to avoid damaging reefs and other habitats, not wreck the beach, and things like that. The cable needs to be in conduits that are buried or anchored. And building those conduits needs to be done in a way that does not mess up the environment.
So what you've got then for a long cable project is two ends that present underwater construction projects, the shallow waters near the two ends where you have to bury the cable, and then the long deep ocean stretch where you are just spooling the cable out.
This suggests the costs are going to have a component that doesn't really depend on how long the thing is (the two ends and the shallow waters near the ends where burial is needed) and a component that is proportional to length (the long run between the two shallow waters near the ends).
At 5 knots, it would take about 1000 hours to lay the deep sea part of the cable. If the ship costs $50k/hour to operate, that would be about $40 million. (I have no idea what it costs to operate these ships, but Google tells me that big cruise ships cost about that much to operate, and I'd guess that a cable laying ship is cheaper).
Assuming the underwater cable itself is 10 times as expensive as regular cable, its about $150 million for 9000 km.
That's brings us to about $200 million for the deep ocean part.
Sigh... Removed because people don't seem to want to see it. Not a big deal, but... sheesh . It's not like it was a troll comment; just a relatively lighthearted poke.
Whats the issue?
Sigh... Removed because people don't seem to want to see it. Not a big deal, but... sheesh . It's not like it was a troll comment; just a relatively lighthearted poke.
I don't get it. Whats the issue?
On another note - the third link captures the back button and doesn’t let you get back to hacker news (at least on mobile). What a shitty site.
My Firefox Developer Edition (86) doesn't load the page completely, one of the resources ( https://gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com/api/w_v2/pagesByU... ) has an untrusted certificate (SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER). It is issued by "Cisco Umbrella Secondary SubCA".
The article says this cable uses SDM (space division multiplexing). Which, for fiberoptics, means that you have multiple fibers. Of course they HAVE TO put many wavelengths on each fiber, each wavelength carrying a signal. The "state-of-the-art" AFAIK is to use many wavelengths per fiber, each one carrying ~192 wavelengths each wavelength transporting at up to 100Gbps (this is known as DWDM). So so with SDM, you just…
The article says this cable uses SDM (space division multiplexing). Which, for fiberoptics, means that you have multiple fibers. Of course they HAVE TO put many wavelengths on each fiber, each wavelength carrying a signal. The "state-of-the-art" AFAIK is to use many wavelengths per fiber, each one carrying ~192 wavelengths each wavelength transporting at up to 100Gbps (this is known as DWDM). So so with SDM, you just…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get it. Whats the issue?
Check the second link. On another note - the third link captures the back button and doesn’t let you get back to hacker news (at least on mobile). What a shitty site.
How the great have fallen...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get it. Whats the issue?
Check the second link. On another note - the third link captures the back button and doesn’t let you get back to hacker news (at least on mobile). What a shitty site.
long click the back button, a popup will show your navigation history and you can click the last link before entering the broken site.
That said, the behavior is absolutely unacceptable.
[1]: And in Firefox desktop you can also do this but I can't remember if it is long-click or right click.