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Google's Subsea Fiber Optics
- elteto 4y agoUnrelated, but if interested in ocean cables check out “A Thread Across the Ocean” by Steele. It’s the story of the first transatlantic cable. It’s a riveting read that is hard to put down. Full of interesting technical details intertwined with the stories of the characters involved. Highly recommended!
- throw0101a 4y agoAlso The Victorian Internet by Standage on the history of the telegraph: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet
- Stratoscope 4y agoOne of my favorite books! Some years ago I bought a dozen extra copies to give away. Just last weekend I was hiking with a few friends. One mentioned that I'd given him a copy, and he started telling me stories from it. Especially what a revolution it was when you could communicate across the world in an instant. We got to talking about the history of undersea cables. I mentioned a very cool interactive map of the current fiber cables and promised I would look it up and send him a link. So, before I forget, here it is: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
- Rebelgecko 4y agoI think it's also obligatory to mention the longish magazine article "Mother Earth, Mother Board" https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/amp https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/amp
- Diederich 4y agoSeconded! I haven't read through a book that quickly in quite a long time.
- cycomanic 4y agoFor those more interested in this topic TE Subcom (now just Subcom) has some cool videos about the process of deploying and repairing these submarine cables. Just search for te subcom on YouTube.
- yewenjie 4y agoI don't understand why or how the people in the video are so glowingly happy/smiling. Is some point being made there?
- sgarman 4y agoAlso crazy camera angles showing the backs / sides of people talking.
- chrisseaton 4y agoPeople happy to share their work. Is that some kind of problem?
- hericium 4y agoFeeling comfortable at work usually doesn't involve grinning into an abyss like at one's best friend. This looks forced and cringey.
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- upwardbound 4y agoThe video doesn't look like that, it looks more like everyone was told "you have to smile more!!"
- chrisseaton 4y agoThis seems a super-cynical take. Some people are smiley and happy naturally. You might pick them to be in a video.
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- openknot 4y agoI was going to write that this was demonstrably untrue, but then I saw the muted-microphone shot of an interviewee laughing without context before cutting to a straight-faced interview segment that appeared more natural (at time = 80 s), which was quite possibly recorded after the straight-faced segment to make the video's happy tone consistent: https://youtu.be/N0ng8R0_Tis?t=80 https://youtu.be/N0ng8R0_Tis?t=80
- ortusdux 4y agoI wonder how long it will be before we see the first hollow-core fiber subsea cables. They are 50% faster, and tests from the last year or two have seen record low signal losses. https://www.laserfocusworld.com/fiber-optics/article/14196057/hollowcore-fiber-is-now-clearer-than-glass https://www.laserfocusworld.com/fiber-optics/article/1419605... https://www.ofsoptics.com/wp-content/uploads/Hollow-Core-Fiber-Cable-FINAL.pdf https://www.ofsoptics.com/wp-content/uploads/Hollow-Core-Fib...
- happyopossum 4y ago> They are 50% faster No, pretty sure light still travels through them at C. What they can do is carry more data, largely by having lower error rates.
- maxfan8 4y agoLight only travels at C in a vacuum (so it doesn't actually travel at C in a standard fiber optic cable, it's actually much slower).
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- theideaofcoffee 4y ago'c' is dependent on the medium. The value of c as it is commonly known, 300 million meters per second, is in vacuum. Light traveling through other media is affected by its index of refraction, in the case of silica fiber, that is approximately 1.5 so radiation propagates much slower through silica than it does a vacuum. Since gases have low refractive indicies already, within a hundred ppm or so of a vacuum, you could essentially round air to 1.
- ortusdux 4y agoI've heard that high frequency traders are interested in Starlink's planned laser links because they could open up routes that are faster than traditional terrestrial fiber.
- gnfargbl 4y agoI make 340Tbit/sec about 1.1x10^11 GiByte/month. GCP premium tier networking is priced at $0.08/GB, so at 80% load that cable would, very naively, have the potential to bring in $7B/month in revenue. I'm sure they only take in a fraction of that, and their costs are substantial. But even so... cloud bandwidth is overpriced.
- dilyevsky 4y ago8c is for transit to outside of their network. For inter-region it’s like 1-15c depending on regions. 1-2c for us/europe which is probably overwhelming majority
- dilyevsky 4y agoAlso 80% utilization seems just ridiculously high to me but maybe at goog volume it’s doable
- klysm 4y agoI remember seeing a cloudflare post about AWS bandwidth pricing where they estimated something like 20% utilization? I don’t remember where though but I think they can approximate pretty well.
- jeffbee 4y agoGoogle regularly runs these at 100%. According to the B4 paper: """These features allow many B4 links to run at near 100% utilization and all links to average 70% utilization over long time periods, corresponding to 2-3x efficiency improvements relative to standard practice"""
- throw0101a 4y agoRichard Steenbergen has regularly given the presentation "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Optical" at NANOG over the years; October 2019: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKeZaNwPKPo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKeZaNwPKPo APNIC/NZNOG had a good presentation focusing on sub-sea optical stuff (January 2020)): * https://blog.apnic.net/2020/02/12/at-the-bottom-of-the-sea-a-short-history-of-submarine-cables/ https://blog.apnic.net/2020/02/12/at-the-bottom-of-the-sea-a... For longer distances (>100km), you want to do a search for "coherent optics".
- vfclists 4y agoWhen they say a single cable can deliver 340 Tbps capacity, do they mean a single fiber strand, or a bundle of strands in a sheath that we know as "cables"?
- wil421 4y agoPretty sure they mean the sheath that contains the bundles of fiber cables.
- cycomanic 4y agoGenerally the throughput for a single mode fibre in the C + L Bands (the wavelength regions used for telecom applications), is about 100 Tbit/s for a one span link (50-100km) for a submarine cable across transatlantic distances IIRC the record is around 50-70 Tbit/s. This is research demonstrations, so the 340 Tbit/s would be for a cable with plenty redundancy. Also note that fibres are used in one direction only (one of the main reasons is that one would otherwise create a very long laser), so for duplex operation you need to double the amount of fibres.
- xenadu02 4y agoIt seems like the expense would be in the armored outer cable, repeaters, and labor for laying the cable but perhaps at those distances the glass cost matters? Still it seems like you'd want to cram as many fibers into the cable as possible. There must be some limiting factor that prevents you from putting 1000 strands or 10,000 strands in a single cable.
- everfrustrated 4y agoAdding more fibres also means more power needed for more repeaters.
- schubart 4y ago> A message took over 17 hours to deliver, at 2 minutes and 5 seconds per letter by Morse code A letter in Morse code is made of up to four “dits” or “dahs”. Why would it take more than two minutes to send one letter?
- joshuahaglund 4y agoThe signal was weak. An attempt at fixing the problem, boosting the voltage, caused the insulation to fail. Later cables added repeaters along the way to maintain the signal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable#First_contact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable#...
- pranjalv123 4y agoYou can read a transcript of the first conversations on the transatlantic telegraph[1]. Basically: the signal was very weak, they needed a lot of time between symbols, and they needed to repeat a lot. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Report_of_the_Joint_Committee_Appointed/76HmAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA232&printsec=frontcover https://www.google.com/books/edition/Report_of_the_Joint_Com...
- Melatonic 4y agoAre we gonna get the Google Moon Cable anytime soon? :-D
- aborsy 4y agoThe internet includes many components: semiconductors/electronics/chips, hardware, fiber optics, communication systems, networking, wireless, software, etc. There is a lot of work that must be done in different parts of this stack for this system to work. Yet, the private sector focuses mostly on the software part, or services. I have rarely seen a start up on improving optical fiber or electronic chips. The public sector builds the infrastructure, often following decades of investment and work. People working on infrastructure either work for the government for pennies or, if they haven’t yet lost their jobs to outsourcing to developing countries, have difficulty finding employment. The profit goes to consumer companies focused on software or services; worse, these companies claim credit for the whole Internet. Obviously CapEx will be large for a company with a product on infrastructure; there are monopolies; customers will be large operators, etc. Still, are there resources to better understand this issue? It always seemed to me a scam. Also, will the situation change for “hardware”startups/companies?
- glaucon 4y ago> The public sector builds the infrastructure It's a little off your point but there was an amusing book published a few years ago which went through twelve, from memory, technologies on which the iPhone was totally dependent and which had all been developed out of the public purse. Can't remember what it was called so if anyone recognises it I'd be interested to hear.
- imranq 4y agoThere is this book by Mariana Mazzucato: The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths I haven't read it, but from the TOC, it looks like these are the technologies that are "invented" by public sector that the iPhone (and other smartphones) rely on: * Giant magnetoresistance (GMR), SPINTRONICS programme and hard disk drives * Solid-state chemistry and silicon-based semiconductor devices * From capacitive sensing to click-wheels * From click-wheels to multi-touch screens * Internet and HTTP/HTML * GPS and SIRI * Battery, display and other technologies ref: https://cms.marianamazzucato.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/TOC_Entrepreneurial_State.pdf https://cms.marianamazzucato.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/... Summary HBR article: https://hbr.org/2013/03/taxpayers-helped-apple-but-app https://hbr.org/2013/03/taxpayers-helped-apple-but-app
- every 4y agoOn my desk sits a paperweight. It is a segment of some ancient undersea cable. About 2 inches in diameter, sheathed in lead with eight main wires and numerous smaller ones in a circular arrangement. Weighs a ton. My dad worked for AT&T and received it as a gift...
- henvic 4y agoomg... I need something like this!
- jduckles 4y agoA bit old now, from 1996, but the classic book-length Wired article "Mother Earth Mother Board" by none other than Neal Stephenson is a peek into how this actually gets done from the physical cable laying pespective: https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
- ayyyolo 4y agocame here for this
- hyperation 4y agoDid they say that this will power the next (Google) Wave™? ;)
- spitfire 4y agoApropos HN and fibre cable laying, I'm told Makailay cable laying software rents out for $20K/Month. Could be more now - this is ~10/yo information. There's lots of niche markets out there. https://www.makai.com/cable-software/makailay/ https://www.makai.com/cable-software/makailay/
- TedShiller 4y agoFunny how tech people (like me) care about pollution from emissions and plastic unless it’s related to rocket launches or huge plastic cables on the ocean floors. Then, nobody mentions it.
- cypress66 4y agoDo rocket launches or cables on the ocean actually contribute a significant percentage to world pollution? I would imagine it's insignificant.
- eptcyka 4y agoRocket launches definitely do.
- cypress66 4y agoDo you have any numbers on that?
- TedShiller 4y agoDo you have numbers that it doesn’t pollute?
- _carbyau_ 4y agoBenefits vs cost. Rocket launches typically develop and support bleeding edge technology. And are relatively infrequent compared to regular travel flights. The "huge" plastic cables are 7-8cm (~3 inches) diameter. So big, but not gas pipeline big. And because of THEIR existence many people are NOT taking those regular travel flights they otherwise might. Not saying we can't do better. But people closer to it and smarter than me would know.
- Cadwhisker 4y agoIf you're interested in learning more about how a WSS (Wavelength Selective Switch) works under the hood, there are 2 main methods: * An array of MEMS micro-mirrors which turn to reflect light, or * Finisar's LCoS based method, which uses a 1" LCD TV display to display a gradient pattern which literally bends light. It looks like the undersea cables use Finisar's (now II-IV's) WSS. I think the idea of bending light under software control is pretty cool. Finisar's white paper showing optical path and other possible uses is here: https://www.amstechnologies.com/fileadmin/amsmedia/downloads/4871_whitepaperprogrammablenarrowbandfiltering.pdf https://www.amstechnologies.com/fileadmin/amsmedia/downloads...
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20150513001347/https://www.amstechnologies.com/fileadmin/amsmedia/downloads/4871_whitepaperprogrammablenarrowbandfiltering.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20150513001347/https://www.amste...
- glenngillen 4y agoWhile I was at AWS I managed to catch a couple of internal presentations from James Hamilton where he went deep into their global network infrastructure. It’s something that’s way outside my wheelhouse but that I find fascinating nonetheless. In particular I always found the discussion about dealing with failure of global infrastructure that’s sitting in the ocean floor particularly intriguing. One non-obvious (to me at least) aspect was what do you do if there’s a failure of the power feed equipment that’s driving the cable. In most cases the answer was “double the voltage until you can repair it properly”. He explains it far better than I ever could on his blog: https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2017/01/cs-responder-trans-oceanic-cable-layer/ https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2017/01/cs-responder-trans...
- saberience 4y agoSo I'm not suggesting we don't lay more undersea cables, but has anyone done any studies on what damage laying these cables does to sealife/coral/habitats on the sea floor? I love scuba diving and I've personally seen many coral reefs wrecked from boat anchors and fishing nets, do undersea cables do similar damage? (I'm guessing yes).