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Google Invests in $300M Submarine Cable to Improve Connection Between Japan, US
- smileysteve 12y agoI wonder what the difference is in the technology of the 3.3TB/s cable and the 60TB/c cable, just strands? (approx 20 more?)
- jpmattia 12y agoThat 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 http://submarinenetworks.com/systems/trans-pacific/unity [2] http://www.globe.com.ph/press-room/globe-regional-connectivity http://www.globe.com.ph/press-room/globe-regional-connectivi...
- btoptical 12y agoNope 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.
- jpmattia 12y ago> 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?
- btoptical 12y agoSee for example: http://newswire.telecomramblings.com/2013/01/telstra-global-and-infinera-first-to-demonstrate-soft-decision-fec-over-4200km-hawaii-to-california-submarine-link/ 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.aspx http://www.corning.com/opticalfiber/products/vascade_fibers.... BTW, I also worked at BBN
- jpmattia 12y ago> See for example: Thanks for the link. I confess I'm a little amazed that Infinera is the basis for running 100G coherent single wavelengths. That's great progress. (Edit- See below) > Essentially the issue with upgrading over the wet plant is basically the presence of nonlinearities on the fiber Yes, and there's great incentive to utilize legacy fiber if possible. (BTW I managed to screw up my comment above when I edited. I had written: Usually the undersea guys are a generation behind, partly because of the need to send a destroyer-looking ship out for any repairs.) > BTW, I also worked at BBN Hello! and hope all is well, whoever you are. :) Edit: The infinera 500G PIC in the PR from Telstra is running its basic bitstreams at 25G and muxing them up - http://www.lightreading.com/optical/dwdm/infinera-unleashes-coherent-100g/d/d-id/689914 http://www.lightreading.com/optical/dwdm/infinera-unleashes-...
- dmourati 12y agoUnity! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yLJ5NHARMk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yLJ5NHARMk
- btoptical 12y agoNope, 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.
- Dobbs 12y agoYour capitalization is incorrect. You wrote TB (terrabyte) when you meant Tb (terrabit). This equates to a 8x difference.
- thathonkey 12y ago(USA) Just wanted to point out that "BTW" is most commonly expected to be an acronym for "by the way" whereas the shorthand for "between" is typically written "b/w" edit: title has been fixed! :)
- dang 12y agoUgh. I don't know how we missed that. (Edit: fixed.)
- dchuk 12y agoThat seems really cheap for such a crucial piece of infrastructure that has to wrap a quarter of the way around the earth
- ChuckMcM 12y agoIf 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.
- notatoad 12y agoThe NEC press release says the total amount of investment across six different companies is approximately $300mm
- tinalumfoil 12y agoYou'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 http://www.nec.com/en/press/201408/global_20140811_01.html
- notatoad 12y agono, the title is accurate. it says "Google invests in $300mm cable", not "Google invests $300mm in cable"
- ChuckMcM 12y agoFacscinating, so now I'm completely confused. If they can pull this cable for 300M$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 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.
- click170 12y agoI 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?
- freehunter 12y agoFrom 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.
- sooper 12y agoThough if they could run it to New Zealand, it would certainly help to have competition with the SCC here...
- joshfraser 12y agoThe cables are pretty limited in both number and capacity. Just compare Australia with Japan for example: http://www.cablemap.info/ http://www.cablemap.info/
- rasz_pl 12y agoPoor inter continental connections dont explain data caps INSIDE their uber fiber national network, do they?
- ripdog 12y agoNo, those are explained by the average consumer not having a clue whether website X is national or international. Seperate billing has been tried in some places, AFAIK always abandoned because it confused customers and made them feel like they were getting screwed over.
- vacri 12y agoAustralia 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.
- turboquant 12y agoA sensor array along the cable line monitoring marine health would yield a data goldmine.
- nyrina 12y agoTotally. But who's willing to pay for that?
- pchristensen 12y agoObligatory link to "Mother Earth, Motherboard" whenever submarine cables are mentioned: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html Best 50 page article you'll read this year.
- sithadmin 12y agoThis really makes me nostalgic. I miss the days when Wired actually had decent content.
- dmix 12y agoWell, journalism was also a good middle-class job back then. Magazines don't pay like they used to. Like upfront budgets to write a high-quality long piece. Reading Hunter S Thompsons letters from the 60s as a freelance journalist you can tell he was able to spend time writing quality articles, with the odd hack job thrown in for extra cash. I highly doubt there are many full-time journos left like that.
- AceJohnny2 12y ago> by Neal Stephenson Well ok then
- pchristensen 12y ago'Nuff said.
- ocb 12y agoI had never read this. Amazing article. Thank you.
- grimgrin 12y agoNicer link for mobile reading: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html
- vdm 12y ago
- BillFranklin 12y agoAnyone want to take a guess at Google's motive (other than goodwill)? Better access to East Asian customers?
- fred_durst 12y ago> 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.
- teek 12y agoI've been living in Japan and access across the pond is a bit flaky at times. Most of the time I can blame my local service provider (a sharehouse) for their piece of shit router, but there are countless numbers of times when a stream will suddenly cut or a connection will just time out for no good reason (while other simultaneous connections even across the ocean are fine).
- BillFranklin 12y agoAh, thanks for the background info.
- vantagepoint 12y agoOn 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.
- ch4s3 12y agoI 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.
- free2rhyme214 12y agoI 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.
- quip 12y agoI'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.
- cpitman 12y agoHere 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-of-internet-users-in-japan/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/276045/age-distribution-o...) and resistance to change.
- maxmcd 12y agoThis might be an absurd question, but I can't think of a better place to ask it. In my mind there's a huge mental disconnect between computers (servers/personal computers) and infrastructure like this. Could someone provide insight on when/how these types of high-throughput cables are used? How the process is managed, by who, and how on earth all those bits are lined up at such a high speed. I understand they're core to the structure of the internet, but I couldn't explain how information ends up in them to my grandmother. edit: looks like the linked wired article is a good place to start
- kens 12y agoYou'd probably find the book Tubes interesting.
- stephen_g 12y agoRouters. Routers everywhere... The internet is broken up into different networks, each one being an 'Atonomous System' (AS). These networks are all connected to other ASes at various interconnection points, such as an Internet Exchange (IX) or another point-of-presence (PoP). At these points, a router on the edge of one network is connected to a router on the edge of another. These 'edge' or 'border' routers talk to each other with a protocol called BGP (Border Gateway Protocol). This lets them 'advertise' all the routes that you can reach through that router to other routers (like, "hey, you can get to 54.24.0.0/16 at cost x through me"). Internally, each AS will also use an internal routing protocol, such as Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) or iBGP (the internal version of Border Gateway Protocol) to internally advertise this information along with information about how to get between internal routers to work out where to go. So if you have a packet at your grandmother's house, it will hit the first router that her cable or DSL is connected to, use something like OSPF to work out the best (fastest) path through the network to a border router, and then from there the best (probably cheapest!) path to the destination based on the information it got from neighboring routers with BGP. This is because there are two ways that ASes will interconnect - either peering, where you say "we'll let you send traffic into your network for free if we can send data into yours", and transit, where you actually pay. There may be two paths to get to your destination, and one might be shorter but more expensive in transit, so the cheaper path might get chosen, depending on the priorities of the ISP. An undersea cable is usually internal to an AS. Typically though, it's not actually the whole cable, but one or more wavelengths through it - for example, some cables have up to ~128 different wavelengths (colours) of light going through them - each 1, 10, 40 or 100Gbps. So a cable operator usually doesn't actually handle any data transfer but just sell wavelengths to different providers. Each one usually has a separate laser and then they are all multiplexed by a piece of optical equipment into a fibre strand. This method of sending multiple wavelengths is called dense wavelength division multiplexing.
- jbverschoor 12y agoWhy only 6 strands? Doesn't it make more sense to put more fiber in there?
- sanoli 12y agoFollowing the tip to Stephenson's article, here's also a really good book, 'The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers'. http://www.amazon.com/The-Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Nineteenth/dp/0802716040 http://www.amazon.com/The-Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Nine...
- contingencies 12y agoThe Chinese mainland will not see significant international speed improvements until the government decides people should see significant international speed improvements. Keeping things slow and unreliable, especially in peak times, is a form of subsidy for local internet-related business and therefore for government control. Subtle, but hugely effective when push comes to shove: more so than firewalling.
- graup 12y agoI wonder if this will improve connection to South Korea as well. Browsing .de websites from here involves a trip around the world, Seoul - San Jose - New York - London - Frankfurt for an average ping of 300ms.
- ceph_ 12y agoIncreases in bandwidth aren't going to lower latency. This path may be slightly more direct than an alternate cable system, but as long as your going through the US, the connection will never be able to go bellow ~200ms between South Korea and Germany.
- DigitalSea 12y agoI would love to see Google do this for Australia and New Zealand as well. Both countries are at the end of the line (so-to-speak) and would benefit greatly from something like this. Our Internet is pretty rubbish and expensive, and while that might be in part due to limited choice of ISP's, archaic Government policies and equipment, bandwidth is a HUGE problem.
- NamTaf 12y agoI always understood that the major problem with our internet is that >90% of our content comes via these cables, which makes the infrastructure costs of supplying bandwidth far more than, say, continental US where you don't have to cross literal oceans to reach all of the servers storing peoples' internet data. If we consumed most of our internet from AU servers, our costs would decrease as you wouldn't need as fat intercontinental pipes.
- wluu 12y agoThere's one company already investing/building on this called SubPartners - http://www.subpartners.net http://www.subpartners.net They are planning 3 submarine cables: 1. APX Central - Connecting Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, Adelaide and Perth. http://www.subpartners.net/cables/apx-central.html http://www.subpartners.net/cables/apx-central.html 2. APX East - Sydney, NZ, California. http://www.subpartners.net/cables/apx-east.html http://www.subpartners.net/cables/apx-east.html 3. APX West - Perth, Jakarta, Singapore. http://www.subpartners.net/cables/apx-west.html http://www.subpartners.net/cables/apx-west.html All 3 are planned to be completed by Q3, 2016. Obviously lots of factors and risks involved. If Google (and others with investments in local clouds. eg: Amazon, Microsoft etc) wanted to invest, those 3 would be what you'd want to invest in.
- ripdog 12y agoAustralia yes, but please don't include New Zealand in that! Our internet is roaring along thanks to enlightened regulation and significant government investment. We're half-way through rolling out a GPON fibre network which will cover 75% of the population by 2019. I'm on 100/50mbit fibre right now, looking forward to a 1000/500 upgrade before the end of the year - totally uncapped and unshaped.
- 7952 12y ago60tbs is such a huge amount of bandwidth. That is the equivalent of 1 million 50mbps wifi connections. Imagine having a single WiFi network with 1 million people all within 25ms latency of one another.