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Google Buys a Piece of a Cable To Japan

Posted by kdawson on Tue Feb 26, 2008 03:43 AM
from the got-fiber dept.
Businesses Google The Internet Networking
Googling Yourself writes "Google announced that they will be part of a six-company consortium that will build a high-bandwidth sub-sea fiber optic cable linking the US and Japan. The new cable system, named Unity, is expected initially to increase Trans-Pacific lit cable capacity by about 20 percent, with the potential to add up to 7.68 Terabits per second of bandwidth across the Pacific. The name Unity was chosen to signify a new type of consortium, born out of potentially competing systems, to emerge as a system within a system, offering ownership and management of individual fiber pairs. Rumors that Google would join the consortium had originally surfaced in September last year but the company had declined to confirm or deny the news."
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  • So how long until... (Score:5, Funny)

    by bennomatic (691188) on Tuesday February 26 2008, @03:45AM (#22556152) Homepage

    ...someone clips this line?

    • until... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Chrisq (894406) on Tuesday February 26 2008, @04:43AM (#22556402)
      Also in the news:

      Microsoft/Yahoo opens deep sea trawler division.

      • Re:So how long until... (Score:5, Funny)

        by RuBLed (995686) on Tuesday February 26 2008, @04:38AM (#22556386)
        But the other end goes to Japan... let's see how freedom stands up against the weekly monstrosities Tokyo is facing + the special once a year event where all the monsters join forces... but you should worry about Ultraman more since he would use those puny cables to round up those monsters...
        • +4 Insightful? Really?
          • I thought that, then I figured it might be a metaphor about the high occurance of earthquakes and typhoons? But I'm not so sure...

        • Re:So how long until... (Score:4, Funny)

          by Dogtanian (588974) on Tuesday February 26 2008, @08:25AM (#22557352) Homepage

          let's see how freedom stands up against the weekly monstrosities Tokyo is facing
          Further horror ensues when it's discovered that the "cable" is in fact a giant tentacle.

          Californian valley girls soon learn what it's like to live with the horror that Japanese schoolgirls face everyday. Meanwhile, enterprising west-coast "gonzo" porn makers film the horrifying attacks and sell them as "Californian Schoolgirl Tentacle Hentai 9".
        • Prince Of Space [dapcentral.org] will keep the cable safe!

  • Sounds like a movie trailer (Score:4, Funny)

    by kaos07 (1113443) on Tuesday February 26 2008, @03:49AM (#22556168)
    Specifically this line: "The name Unity was chosen to signify a new type of consortium, born out of potentially competing systems, to emerge as a system within a system, offering ownership and management of individual fiber pairs."

  • how many strands (Score:5, Interesting)

    by seanadams.com (463190) * on Tuesday February 26 2008, @03:52AM (#22556180) Homepage
    in such a cable?

    And how do you figure out the optimal capacity to install anyway? To me 7 Tbits does not sounds like much to link two whole countries. Surely there is some point of diminishing returns, but why not more than this?

    • AFAIK, the highest speeds on a single fiber are 10Gbps, which would make this a bundle of 768 fibers (which would make sense in accordance with things involving computers commonly involving powers of 2 & 3).

      IANAIE (internet engineer) though.

      • Re:how many strands (Score:5, Informative)

        by OeLeWaPpErKe (412765) on Tuesday February 26 2008, @05:00AM (#22556470) Homepage
        Actually you might want to look up DWDM and CWDM. It really depends on the cable, but even with systems commercially available (if a bit pricey) today, you can do up to 80 channels on a single fiber strand, allowing for 800 Gbit per fiber line (half duplex), which means you can achieve 800 Gbit per fiber pair full duplex.

        This obviously depends on a lot of things, the most important parts are the retransmission stations on the cable (every 50 km or so), as they're very hard, and VERY expensive to replace. Generally half the fiber strands are backups, and all cables connect only to either even or uneven retransmission stations, allowing the cable to keep functioning with the loss of any one retransmission station (a frequent occurance). Problem is that for repairs a ship needs to come by, retrieve 3 transmission stations from their 200 meter depths, and get engineers close enough to conduct repairs, while preventing other ships from crossing the exposed 200-or-so kilometer of exposed cable. This is one of those ships [k-kcs.jp].

        Btw these retransmission stations are sinking pods that "float" below the ocean at a given depth (generally 200 meters or so). They are powered by a high voltage current transmission system in the cable itself.

        Wikipedia entry on WDM [wikipedia.org]

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mrxak (727974)
      Well, it's still 7 Tbits more than there used to be.

      • Re:how many strands (Score:5, Insightful)

        by dintech (998802) on Tuesday February 26 2008, @08:40AM (#22557456)
        Indeed.

        Lets say 314 kbit/s [wikipedia.org] is a ballpark figure for youtube bitrate.
        That means roughly 26,000,000 more Japanese could watch the latest lonelygirl15 installment at once.

        Also it's roughly 36 Mbit/s [wikipedia.org] for blu-ray quality content.
        That means roughly 210,000 more Americans all at once could watch as much HD quality tentacle related entertainment as they wanted.

        Of course if you half those numbers they could share. This could be the beginnings of a great cultural enlightenment for everyone involved!
    • The capacity isn't likely to be the reason they're choosing to lay 7TBits of extra bandwidth. They're more likely to be laying what they think they can sell + what they want for themselves + a small amount of redundancy. The physical cable isn't free so putting it a whole lot and leaving it dark is a waste of money. If you don't need it yourself and you can't sell it, why bother?
    • Did you RTFA? No, I guess not, this is slashdot after all. Anyway, here's your answer:

      The new five fiber pair cable system can be expanded up to eight fiber pairs, with each fiber pair capable of carrying up to 960 Gigabits per second (Gbps). By having a high fiber count, Unity is able to offer more capacity at lower unit costs.
      So that's 10 strands, expandable to 16. That probably means that the cable itself has 16 strands, but only 10 are lit.
      • Its more like they are using 10 channel repeaters and I don't know of anyone using more than 16 channel undersea repeaters which I expect is as large as its stocked on the repair ships. The 2 channel repeaters cost about US$1,000,000 each which gets expensive when you figure you need one every 100 to 200 km or so. I'm surprised that Google didn't look into the new technology from Alcatel which can go thousands of km without a repeater so you can keep all your repeating stations on dry land. Under sea cab
  • More bandwidth for adverts?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by RuBLed (995686)
      I guess so... Japan got around 130 million people and considering the land area of the country it could only mean a greater population density. Ads love greater population densities. Imagine serving ads on public places, in trains and buses, and even on the weird personal gadgets that they always carry. (like their mobile tv on a DS)

      and better yet, they could make it video ads... (if not video ads, then at least youtube could better endure the influx of japanese anime and japanese game shows)

    • Re:Bandwidth (Score:4, Informative)

      by SeaFox (739806) on Tuesday February 26 2008, @05:40AM (#22556610)

      More bandwidth for adverts?

      No, more bandwidth for undersea-cable rape hentai.

  • Open access for all (Score:3, Insightful)

    by The Ancients (626689) on Tuesday February 26 2008, @03:54AM (#22556190) Homepage
    This coupled with Google's open access ideas for wireless in the US could be a very good thing. Although, having cheaper bandwidth for all will benefit Google as well, of course. As they build and absorb other companies, the bandwidth requirements of their product range is ever increasing.

  • Good news all around if it happens (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Psychotria (953670) on Tuesday February 26 2008, @04:00AM (#22556208)
    [...] sustain the unprecedented growth in data and Internet traffic between Asia and the United States. [...](will) increase Trans-Pacific lit (sic) cable capacity by about 20 percent

    Seems pretty significant. Additionally I wonder how this will affect other countries within the Pacific region... in particular (because I reside there) Australia. It is a fairly short hop from Japan to Australia, and hopefully at some point the increased bandwidth is extended.

    At Chikura, Unity will be seamlessly connected to other cable systems, further enhancing connectivity into Asia.

    This statement seems to at least allure to increased bandwidth to all nearby nations, including I suppose nations not "Asian"; e.g. China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Australia and maybe New Zealand. This, of course, is pure conjecture on my part; but a new link to Japan, while being great for Japan, may be just a stepping stone onto even bigger things. My globe just shrunk a little bit more.

    • Re:Good news all around if it happens (Score:5, Funny)

      by kitsunewarlock (971818) on Tuesday February 26 2008, @04:37AM (#22556382) Journal

      My globe just shrunk a little bit more.

      They sell a creme for that.

    • Re:Good news all around if it happens (Score:5, Informative)

      by totally bogus dude (1040246) on Tuesday February 26 2008, @05:18AM (#22556536)

      I don't think it will have much, if any, effect on Australia. Most of the focus of our ISPs is getting to the West coast of North America, and going via Japan is a pretty significant detour. Mind you, the Australia-Japan Cable gives us 320 Gbit/sec to Japan.

      A trace from a server in Ohio to 72.14.235.104 (one of google.co.jp's addresses) has a RTT of 200 ms, which is about the same as the East coast of Australia to www.google.com (I get 230 ms from Perth). So for US-based sites going via this new cable would, I imagine, be quite a bit slower than via more direct links. We also already have several independent links to the US, so it wouldn't even be much benefit to us as a backup.

      According to this random site [happyzebra.com], Sydney to San Jose is almost 12,000 km (by air). Sydney to Tokyo is 7,700 km. The press release declares that the new cable will be approximately 10,000 km, so that's around an extra 5,000 km via this route minimum. I suspect any run from Australia to Japan isn't going to be particular direct though; AJC is apparently 12,700 km.

      This PDF [atug.com.au] provides some maps of the approximate cable locations. It has one marked "New Japan-US Plans" which might be referring to the Unity cable.

    • Well, we could be in luck. In a little over a year, a new 2Tb cable to Guam [on.net] is coming online. From what I can gather on the internet, part of "Unity" is Pacnet's EAC Pacific cable. This will cover the Southern loop of the system and pass through ... Guam!

      Finally, we won't be solely dependent on the Southern Cross Cable [wikipedia.org] our Kiwi friends gracefully provided us with, or the woefully inadequate Australia-Japan cable [wikipedia.org].
      • There are other cables from Australia -> US. Its just that companies like AT&T and Telstra don't talk about theirs. In fact the Southern Cross Cable was the modern cable to be hyped.
        • Exactly, the modern one made for big internet bandwidth. All the other, older, cables simply don't have anywhere near the capacity needed for current-day internet use. In essence, they are telephone cables more than anything. They are used for calls and low-bandwidth fixed corporate data circuits, but the ISPs don't tend to use them.

          There are loads of cables from here into asia too. But again, all of them are too low capacity; the only somewhat useful one for internet traffic is the Perth-Singapore cable.
    • I heard, a number of years ago, that Australia had bee locked in to using a single provider or two and the cost was astronomical. I think this was in Western Australia primarily, but the situation wasn't too much better even in the more populated Eastern Australia. Do you guys have any competition for broadband out there yet?
  • Terabits again. I have a friend who doesn't understand Terabits, can someone put that in Libraries of Congress for my...ahem...friend?
    • In congress terms, a terabit is a thousand pipes.
    • I don't really understand LoC, so I googled a figure.
      http://www.uplink.freeuk.com/data.html [freeuk.com]

      10 Terabytes: The printed collection of the US Library of Congress

      mage@prometheus:~$ calc 7/8
                      0.875
      mage@prometheus:~$ calc 10/.875
                      ~11.42857142857142857143

      11.43 seconds per LoC

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Umuri (897961)
      Being as the standard estimate used in the LoC/s standard (20 terabytes/sec), and it's a 7.68 terabit line, you can do some simple math.

      Assuming that a terabyte is 8 terabits, the line adds .96 terabytes/sec in bandwidth, so you'd get the Library of Congress in around 21 seconds.

      So approximately 1/21 LoC/sec, or 2.85 LoC/min.

  • Nothing nefarious, just good business (Score:5, Informative)

    by Raindeer (104129) on Tuesday February 26 2008, @04:32AM (#22556352) Homepage Journal
    Just posted this on my blog: http://lunaticthought.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com] (You can find more info here on the economics of submarine fibre and nice pictures of the Tyco Responder Cable laying vessel)

    Gigaom is reporting on Google buying a share into the Unity submarine cable. Many people will read into this an attempt by Google to become a telco or do anything out of its current layer 7 service and application business. I don't belief it is, it's just simple economics. Google now buys wholesale capacity instead of retail. My reaction on Gigaom was:

    One of the main drivers for wanting your own fibre on certain submarine routes is the pricing strategy of the owners of the submarine fiber. Traditionally these fibres have been owned by incumbent national monopolists. Their pricing was set at a fixed price per Mbit/s. If your banndwidth utilisation grew, their income grew too, though their costs didn't, leading to excess profits. On the Transatlantic route this problem has been solved by having an oversupply of commercial competitive fiber. The oversupply resulted in a situation I call mutually assured destruction, where everybody went bankrupt and whole networks were sold for pennies.

    On the Pacific route it's mostly incumbent national monopolists owning fibre and they probably have learned from the Atlantic disaster. This means prices don't drop (or not as quickly as traffic growth) and that means that some parties see an increase in their traffic costs. Google now has solved this by joining a club of submarine fiber owners and not having to worry anymore about the cost of a megabit/s. Google just has to worry about when they will fill up their terabit chunk and when someone will slice through the fibre.

    BTW I'm willing to bet Google will join another club on this route to add some much needed redundancy.

    • Well, yes (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Psychotria (953670) on Tuesday February 26 2008, @04:57AM (#22556448)
      Interesting points. For a (not entirely off-topic) good read on the lost fortunes and tenacity of individuals making a transatlantic cable reality, I'd recommend A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable by J.S.Gordon. The first cable (not fiber-optic of course) was a pain in the butt for all. As far as I know, the lessons learned in those pioneering days are still important. This [wikipedia.org] contains some interesting info on those pioneering days.

      BTW I'm willing to bet Google will join another club on this route to add some much needed redundancy.

      I am willing to bet you're right.

  • let's watch out for those stray anchors [slashdot.org] people.

  • Sweet! (Score:2, Informative)

    by Sabz5150 (1230938)
    A brand new fat pipe to download tentacle he^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H internet content!
  • One of Google's motivations for the Trans-Pacific capacity bandwidth is to support the new data centers it will be building in Asia, as discussed here on Slashdot [slashdot.org] last month and updated today at Data Center Knowledge [datacenterknowledge.com]. In recent months there have been reports that Google has been scouting multiple locations around the Pacific Rim for new facilities, and it could easily have one or more ready by the time the undersea cable is completed in 2010. Google likes strong connectivity between its data centers. The pl
    • Outsourcing jobs to Japan would be the dumbest move ever.

      • Corrected: Re: Outsource is now faster! (Score:4, Funny)

        by jchillerup (1140775) on Tuesday February 26 2008, @04:23AM (#22556306)
        Outsourcing jobs to Japan would be the dumbest movie ever. http://youtube.com/watch?v=09SAiBiD0ak [youtube.com]

        • If you RTA you see that an Indian company is involved in building the cable as well - it's NOT just Japan.

          So? That's irrelevant. An Indian company is part of the consortium that's *building* the connection. Doesn't mean that the cable itself is going to India any more than it's going to Singapore because another of the companies is from there.

          Go back and tell me where it says the cable is going anywhere other than between the US and Japan. It's not.

          The fact that traffic might then be passed to and from other indirectly connected networks within mainland Asia (including India) is entirely unrelated to an In

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by tkh (126785)
      You should use more reliable information source on this. Google *is* the most popular search engine in Japan, and YouTube traffic has been taking bandwidth between the U.S. and Japan. This is one of the main motivations for Google to buy a piece of a cable.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by fullback (968784)
        Yahoo is the most popular search engine in Japan.

        Japanese speak Japanese. They don't visit or read English-langiage websites any more than Americans visit Japanese-language websites hosted in Japan. Get it?

        I live in Japan. You know nothing.

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