Cable-Laying Boom Will Boost Internet Capacity 176
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."
Meh (Score:5, Interesting)
Not that laying all this undersea cabling will do anybody any good due to "last mile" crap.
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:Really hate those "domesday" predictions.... (Score:4, Interesting)
See here: The Domesday Book, especially the last paragraph of the introduction. [wikipedia.org]
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.
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.