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Cable-Laying Boom Will Boost Internet Capacity
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Jul 08, 2008 10:02 AM
from the well-the-oceans-are-cute dept.
from the well-the-oceans-are-cute dept.
Barence writes "Dozens of new undersea internet cables are set to be laid over the next couple of years, providing a huge boost to worldwide capacity. The huge boom in internet video has led to doomsday scenarios of the internet running out of capacity. Although experts believe that there is abundant amounts of 'dark fibre' lying unused in oceans across the world, major telcos are pushing ahead with projects that will see at least 25 new cables laid by 2010, at a cost of $6.4bn."
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Domesday (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
We don't need another hero. All we want is life beyond the bandwidth dome...
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What typos are you talking about, you mad parent?
Dark Fibre? (Score:5, Funny)
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How about the "boom", is that part normal?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Finally a scientific explanation for the ever accelerating expansion of porn on the internet
This time... (Score:5, Funny)
More cable? (Score:2, Funny)
Anchors Aweigh!
Note from teh Pendantic Squid (Score:5, Informative)
Your trusty Quartermaster logs the event, and the ship is legally underway (should paint be traded with another vessel, and a trip to the "Long Green Table" ensue).
The command (in the US Navy, anyway) is "Let go the anchor", and the bosun trips the pelican hook (usually with a sledge hammer), a deafening roar ensues as the chain comes flying out of the chain locker, and everyone on the fo'c'sle has a religious experience.
Parent
Will this help EU/US? (Score:3, Insightful)
The cables are predominantly set to be laid in areas such as Africa, the Caribbean and the Middle East, which are currently underserved.
So, in the Caribbean and Africa? Is the demand for video and other such growing traffic in huge demand there?
It doesn't seem that it will really increase traffic throughput for the Eu and the US where this traffic has the most potential to grow.
Am I wrong?
Re:Will this help EU/US? (Score:4, Insightful)
With all the spying going on, the less traffic that has to go through the states, the better.
Parent
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UK and US Gov. back the plan.
Phorm is providing a capital investment.
Re:Will this help EU/US? (Score:4, Interesting)
You might be wrong. We've already laid a ton of fiber down to serve Asia, North America, Europe. A lot of that is still unused.
There's not so much fiber serving the Carribbean, the Middle East, and Africa now, but the capacity for demand is growing. Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Bahrain are using their oil wealth to build whole new cities that will compete, not with industrial cities like Delhi or Beijing, but with New York, London, Silicon Valleyâ"the places where money is made on ideas, not extractive resources or physical products. They are trying to build first-class universities too. They are going to demand top-notch informatics and telecom capabilities, and thanks to your boss's car, they have the cash to get it.
Africa and the Caribbean are a bit different, but Egypt and South Africa are in good positions to make use of it. Some of the more stable countries (Morocco, Tanzania) could grow into it within a decade, and that's assuming that Lagos and Zimbabwe don't fix themselves up (I wouldn't hold your breath, but if it happened, they'd need fiber to sell oil/food/minerals). I suspect the Caribbean line is intended for Cuba, one the US ends its brain-dead embargo.
Parent
Great (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
What do you need to do that for? Just get your wife/girlfriend to watch it with you. Problem solved. They're just as horny as you are, they just hide it better. And... your son is going to find it no matter where you put it. Trust me.. been there, done that.
Your grammar are terrible. (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess it's early in the morning...
Sigh. 'editors'.
artificial scarcity (Score:4, Insightful)
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The Fiber I Care About (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, this does mean that ship anchors are less likely to take down countries than before.
Re:The Fiber I Care About (Score:5, Funny)
Even if you could, you'd be capped at 40GB/mo and get Copyright warnings in the email.
Parent
slashdotters... (Score:5, Funny)
Dozens of new undersea internet cables are set to be laid
Look, even cables get laid
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It helps if you know how "filleted" is pronounced.
Really hate those "domesday" predictions.... (Score:5, Insightful)
And when will the editors learn to read or at least use a spell checker?
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Re:Really hate those "domesday" predictions.... (Score:4, Interesting)
See here: The Domesday Book, especially the last paragraph of the introduction. [wikipedia.org]
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I agree. The Internet will never hit any capacit......
*DING*
The Internet is full. Please shut down your computer to help free up space.
Meh (Score:5, Interesting)
Not that laying all this undersea cabling will do anybody any good due to "last mile" crap.
Domesday scenarios (Score:2)
I think we've all been through the various domesday scenarios: Biosphere II probably being the most well known. I guess there's not much to say about them except remember to bring some extra oxygen...
Dark Fiber (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a Wikipedia Article [wikipedia.org] about it, and a book [google.com] with the title that seems largely unrelated. We all know there are many rumors about Google Buying It [internetoutsider.com].
How much is there though? What kind of fiber is it? MMF [wikipedia.org] or SMF? [wikipedia.org] Also, if this fiber has been unused for years, it would have to be tested to make sure it doesn't have any major breaks in the lines.
Depending on the type, location, amount, and condition of this fiber it could be a major asset... or not. I haven't been able to find any detailed information about it, I'm sure some of our Slashdot crowd working in networking must have a better idea than I?
Re:Dark Fiber (Score:4, Informative)
Dark fiber is fiber optic that is unused. Fiber optic has light going through it. Unused it has no light going through it. No light means it's dark.
So what they are talking about is lots of fiber optic line that is not being used for one reason or another(some have redundent lines that are used only if there is a break or other pointless reasons). I hope that helps.
Parent
Re:Dark Fiber (Score:5, Insightful)
So what they are talking about is lots of fiber optic line that is not being used for one reason or another
The majority of dark fiber is owned by the Tier 1 ISP's, specifically, Level3. The fiber was laid by small independants during the .com bubble, and as those companies folded, telecoms bought it up for pennies on the dollar.
They bought the fiber explicitly for the purpose of preventing competition from springing up, and, god forbid, offering broadband at a reasonable price. Now, they keep it dark so they can claim that their network capacity is near its limit and justify the incredibly draconian policy they have toward network growth.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
No light means it's dark.
But that's only half the story.
Because it's dark (dark is heavier than light, which is why it gets darker the deeper you go into the oceans), the cable sinks to the bottom. If the cables were full of light, they'd float to the top of the ocean where pirates could steal the bandwidth and possibly spread spam or even malware worldwide.
The trick, of course is ensuring that "undersea cables" remain so. For that, anchors are used. They're sort of like firewall anchors, but bigger and
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Well you could use those lines and if one line goes down you could still route those people over to the other line. This routing would only decrease the bandwidth to what it is currently used while having both operational would increase bandwidth. So yeah it is kind of pointless it use that redundant line only in the instance of a break.
Also if you aren't actively monitoring that line you could have a break in your active one and have no backup. That way you would know when there was a break reroute traf
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Much of the dark fiber out there is in the form of unused strands in cable bundles.
When a fiber line is run nobody runs a single pair of fiber stands, they run a cable with dozens to hundreds of strands in it.
They then light one or two pairs with gear running at anything from 1 to 40 Gb/s
The results is that there are many-many inter-city cables with 72 fiber strands each of which could carry (with dwdm harware) 160 x 40Gb/s channels but are only being used for a single 10Gb/s link.
So a typical fiber cable h
Video capacity issues... (Score:4, Insightful)
Extended Edges Free the Middle (Score:2)
The extra interlinks will also relieve bottlenecks elsewhere. Since most Internet bandwidth now goes through the US, other links offloading from the segments tying the US together will also increase the spare capacity of those relieved internal links.
The telcos are going to have to lie a lot harder to pretend that there's not enough US bandwidth to retain Network Neutrality, and instead start the Net Doublecharge on bandwidth already paid for at the other ends.
Glad to hear it (Score:2)
This can't happen soon enough.
DUH! (Score:3, Insightful)
This is not really a breakthrough.
we've known this for years. And, the telcos and network owners keep telling us that bandwidth is scarce. It's not scarce. It's an infinitely scalable resource.
lay more fiber add more routers, it gives you more bandwidth.
They don't really want to pay for it. At this point, telcos and network owners are literally prohibiting progress on the Internet.
I have a great name for the project! (Score:2)
Oh please (Score:4, Interesting)
I have been hearing this for year,
but sorry there really is NO "doomsday scenarios of the internet running out of capacity" from video! I am really getting sick of hearing this.
Digital video is all or nothing, meaning it will play or it will not play. If you can't get enough bandwidth you net nothing! It's not like analog TV where the signal just gets degraded a bit but you can still watch it, on the net you just can't get it to play at all.
If it doesn't play most people will give up, get board and go away, back to there TV's or what ever they do and so the Internet doesn't die.
It self regulates where just a certain percentage of video is too crappy to play and people give up, and some start ups can't make their cheap crappy ISP's work and go bust.
It's not like everyone will just keep trying to use the video even when it's not working for them.
They will back off.
So far youtube hasn't brought down the Internet.
There are also many architectures that allow a company like youtube to bypass much of the backbones and so they will also not effect the performance of the Internet as much as you might think. I was calling this distributed servers, now called content distribution networks, but basically, you don't put up one massive server in one place but many server as close to the views as possible minimizing the distance the video packets must travel. Thereby using a little of the Internet as possible. So even QoS and these
cable-laying booms really aren't going to make any difference with video since most video doesn't go over International cables and can't use QoS unless your some large corporation paying for QoS on your H.323 Video Conferencing System.
In the end, any crying "doomsday scenarios" is like crying the sky is falling, they are just trying to grab headlines and should be treated like the idiots they are.
John L. Sokol
www.videotechnology.com
Numbers don't add up (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work for a company that was attempting to manufacture fiber-based AWG (Arrayed Waveguide Grating) devices back in about 2000. At that time, the fraction of fiber in the ground that was dark was thought to be about 99%. The devices we were testing were capable of multiplexing 16 channels together on to one fiber. The standard speed for a fiber link over single mode fiber is 2.5 Gbit/s, and a fiber link requires a pair of fibers, (for bi-directional traffic.. I suppose if you only wanted to send data one way, you could use a single one.) At that time, there were multiple competitors that had 40 channel devices based on some different technologies. When I stopped paying attention to what was available, 160 channel devices were being talked about and 80 channel devices were on the market. The cost of one of these AWGs was about $20k, (to buy as a customer, not the cost of production), and they have since come down in price by a large amount. You would need one on each end of the fiber. If we assume that 80 channel devices are available, and 1% of the fiber in the ground (the portion that was used) was 1 pair, then there were at least 8000 2.5 Gbit/s channels available in whatever segment of the network contained "99% dark fiber".
I haven't been able, in the last few minutes, to find stats on current backbone traffic levels, but I seriously doubt that the amount of potential long-haul fiber capacity is the reason for laying these cables. The only valid reasons I can see are that the existing ones are owned/controlled by entities that aren't cooperating or utilizing their cables very well or that redundancy is desired. The article states that Google is planning on running a cable from the US to Japan. I have to assume that this is more because the owners of existing cables are not cooperating. This might be the start of investment in a highly fractured network which does not have the redundancy that the internet was originally designed to provide.
Check out the cable laying blog (Score:5, Informative)
One of the oddest blogs out there, but strangely compelling.
mideast, south asia cable cut Feb 2008 (Score:3, Informative)
More fiber means more redundancy. But there are still vulnerable chokepoints.
Plate tectonics? (Score:3)
It would be interesting to know, how much extra length the oceanic floor cables get in order to account for plate tectonics [wikipedia.org] (more specifically for divergent boundaries, like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge or East Pacific Rise?
Of course, the typical speed of plate movement being no more than 10 cm / year, I expect an answer to be in the order of thousands of years...
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But they're switching them off!! (Score:2)
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTAT-1 [wikipedia.org]
WTF? "not commercially viable"
The ACs referring to this article (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html [wired.com]
It also resulted in one of the thickest copies of Wired ever produced (seriously, it was like a friggin' phone book.)