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Comments: 136 +- Technology: Transpacific Unity Fiber Optic Cable Leaves Japan on Monday November 02, @08:12AM
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JoshuaInNippon writes "The 10,000 km (6,200 mile) long Unity fiber optic cable, funded by Google and five East Asian communication companies, left Japanese shores on November 1st to be laid along the northern Pacific Ocean floor. The Japanese end of the cable is expected to be fused to the American end sometime around November 11th. The cable, which was announced in February of 2008 at a cost of around $300 million USD, has the theoretical capacity of 7.68 Tbps, but will be set at a capacity of about 4.8 Tbps (supposedly equivalent to about 75 million simultaneous phone calls) during its initial use. When Unity begins full operation sometime early next year, it is projected to increase internet traffic capacity between the two regions by over 20%, a wonderful boost to transpacific relations!"
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Yes! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
$300m, isn't that the cost of a few US senators "campaign contributions"? :(
More fiber please, money that's more wisely spent. Now how about tackling the problem of fiber to the home.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Yes! (Score:4, Funny)
That would be the case if one part would still be in Japan. However the cable left Japan, which must mean both sides (and everything in the middle) is ouside of Japan.
(Yes, I only read the subject, why?)
Parent
Re:Yes! (Score:5, Funny)
That maybe fine for you, but here in Japan the Internet is basically one big LAN.
So basically we have so much of the stuff tentacles are poking out of our USB ports.
What that does mean for us, here in the land of Hello Kitty, is faster access to a range of porn featuring fewer celaphods and more girls with non-pixelized genitals.
Parent
Dam (Score:5, Funny)
Even fiber optic cable is getting laid...
Re: (Score:2)
Even fiber optic cable is getting laid...
Never mind. Your turn will come someday.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Your turn will come someday
Not
Re:Dam (Score:4, Funny)
Never mind. Your turn will come someday.
...IN SEA BED!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, I've certainly found that my superior spelling abilities have given me great success with the ladies!
Not.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't think women look at how guys spell as a factor for whether or not they're going to have sex. You seriously think that being a "good guy" will get you any sex? Think twice! :-)
No I don't actually.
On the other hand I do, somewhat belatedly, realize that I should have added some kind of sarcasm tags for the benefit of those who couldn't figure out that "when he learns how to spell" was a euphemism for "never."
How does that work, exactly? (Score:5, Interesting)
So I've got a bunch of cable laying around, figure I'll run my own line from Japan to California. How does that work, exactly? I assume the cable is protected in some extremely strong waterproof and snag-proof sheath, but do they really just roll it off the ship, let it fall to the ocean floor, and there it sits? Do they have to occasionally throw a repeater overboard as well? I've always been curious how we're actually able to have these outrageously long cables under the sea and that it works, and works well enough that I believe cables are still the preferred method of data movement, with satellites being a distant second.
Re:How does that work, exactly? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, you need repeaters every 100km or so, which are powered through the cable by DC current.
Other than that, I think it just lays in the bottom, yes. These are sturdy cable, they weigh about 10 kg/m.
Parent
Re:How does that work, exactly? (Score:4, Interesting)
I believe that the cable is plowed in close to shore where possible to protect it against nets, anchors, etc.
Parent
Re:How does that work, exactly? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
but if they start putting armor on the fiber optic repeaters, how will the next generation of sharks get the lasers they so desperately need?
Re:How does that work, exactly? (Score:5, Informative)
Wikipedia, pfffft. I learned all I need to know about Trans Oceanic Fiber Optic cables in 56 short pages thanks to Neal Stephenson... http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html [wired.com]
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
One of my favorite things Wired ever published. I liked it so much I made a map to go along with it since Neal was kind enough to supply GPS coordinates in the article. http://visualcompanion.org/Map_-_Mother_Earth_Mother_Board.php [visualcompanion.org]
Particularly neat (to me) was to see the cove of the Museum of Submarine Telegraphy, Porthcurno, Cornwall exactly as he described it.
Re: (Score:2)
Wikipedia has some great pictures of the different layers of undersea cables.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
with satellites being a distant second.
Have you ever used satellite internet/phones? I have at sea. And disregarding the much lower speeds, the lag makes it highly unsuitable for some usages. We had VOIP phones on our connection. With geostationary satellites the signal take about 200ms just to get from your local point on earth and back down to the other ground-based point. That's very noticable when talking with someone on the phone. Especially when adding a bit more delays at the VOIP-stage and PSTN side too... On the other hand, you can get
Re:How does that work, exactly? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah screw the article, here is a video and they speak a thousand words. Very cool to actually see the cable being pulled out and what the repeater looks like.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOyKdJWPlZY [youtube.com]
SEACOM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgKezSWuAGE&feature=related [youtube.com]
Construction of East Africa's undersea fibre optics cable
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW0Fp-bbKWI [youtube.com]
Alaska Communications Systems Undersea Fiber Optic Projects
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJt0sh1d-H0 [youtube.com]
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Faster Access To Hulu! (Score:5, Funny)
Sweet, this will give me faster access to Hulu, Slacker, and all of the nice American websites.
Re: (Score:2)
Thank you, Captain Obvious!
Surprisingly small sounding numbers (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. With all of the megabit and gigabit links being thrown around, surely a major line like this should have more bandwith than a mere few terabits?
I suppose not.
More reduncancy is good... (Score:2)
...but it would be nice to have the landings more widely distributed, especially on the US Atlantic coast.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but then they'd have to route the cable through the Panama Canal.
Re: (Score:2)
No, they'd just have to not route 75% or so of them through New York.
intercontinental railway (Score:2)
Will there be a ceremonial connection of a golden coupler when the cables meet in the middle?
Obligatory Stephenson Wired article (Score:2)
Back in 1996 Neal Stephenson wrote a really excellent article, "Mother Earth Mother Board" in Wired. If you're curious about what it actually takes to wire the world it's a really excellent read.
Paged:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html [wired.com]
Single-page:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html [wired.com]
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
But 56 pages, is there a diploma afterwards?
More Asian spam volume? (Score:2)
Is that what this is for?
How much of that cost is the cable? (Score:3, Interesting)
How much of that cost is the cable?
Re:How much of that cost is the cable? (Score:4, Informative)
How much of that cost is the cable?
http://www.isp-planet.com/business/fiber_price_bol.html [isp-planet.com]
On land rural jobs cost about $15K/mile. On land super-urban jobs cost about $500K/mile. The difference is permits, corruption, kickbacks, etc. Also scaling is important, "one job in Montana" may be hundreds of miles, and "one job in Manhatten" may be measured in feet, but the fixed costs are... fixed... so the cost per mile seems higher on the short jobs.
If you assume underwater fiber costs around as much as the total cost of cheap rural route, the 6200 mile route times 16K/mile equals about $100M. That makes sense, since the whole job is only supposed to cost about $300M.
Repairing fiber is somewhat more difficult than laying fiber because it's time sensitive. But then again they probably charge by the hour anyway. Since a "several day" repair job approaches $10M, if you assume that is 4 days at $10M total, that would be about $2.5M per day. The little row boat they're using is going to take about 40 days to paddle across the pond, 40 days * $2.5M a day conveniently works out to about $100M. That makes sense, since the whole job is only supposed to cost about $300M.
Add in the usual admin overhead, several multimillion dollar executive bonuses, engineering work, station gear at each endpoint, marketing and sales upfront expenses including slashvertisements, booze, coke, etc, I think they could blow somewhat less than $100M on that.
My labor estimate is probably about right for overtime repair work and a bit high for contracted construction work. My estimate for overhead may be a bit high. That means the cost of the cable itself probably is about $125M to $150M.
Parent
Copper (Score:2)
"The cable ... has the theoretical capacity of 7.68 Tbps, but will be set at a capacity of about 4.8 Tbps (supposedly equivalent to about 75 million simultaneous phone calls) during its initial use."
We've come a long way from copper telegraph lines.
More fiber (Score:3, Funny)
Isn't that also what the bread companies keep trying to sell us?
Relations (Score:2)
it is projected to increase internet traffic capacity between the two regions by over 20%, a wonderful boost to transpacific relations!
Man, I hate those Japanese! And they hate us too!
(More internet bandwidth)
Suddenly we both love each other! Awww...
yay! (Score:2)
More people who don't speak English will be on my team in L4D! That's great for teamwork, right?
BitTorrent (Score:3, Funny)
And the cable will be full of BitTorrent traffic in 5..4..3...2.. There we go!
Upgrade time again!
be careful (Score:2)
Can't wait (Score:3, Interesting)
Looking forward to this here in Malaysia. Global Transit's HQ is just 200m from my house. When I see the truck pulling the final bit of cable wet and dripping from its long sea voyage, I'll slip the dudes a few bucks to tap a slice off for me.
Seriously, though, this is a country where almost all content of interest is foreign: unlike Japan or Thailand, say, there's no significant local-language content industry. Everyone reads English and/or Chinese and therefore skips straight past the homegrown small-potatoes sites, on to the major international sites (in fact I think most Americans would be surprised how well-integrated Malaysians are into the American view of the web). Every little bit of overseas capacity makes a big difference. Most Malaysian users' home broadband is capped to a measly maximum 4mbps because demand for bandwidth so far outstrips supply.
75 million? (Score:3, Interesting)
The article submitter seems skeptical of 4.8 Tbps being 75 million simultaneous calls.
So is 4.8 Tbps really 75 million simultaneous phone calls? Let's do some simple calculations. If we want to go with exactly 4.8 Tbps we can say that's 480 OC-192 circuits. An OC-192 is equivalent to 192 DS3s. So that gives us 92,160 DS3s. Each DS3 carries 28 T1s. So that's 2,580,480 T1 circuits. Ignoring signaling channels and going with a standard DS0 signal of 64 kbps you have 24 channels per T1. Uh oh, that only gets us 61,931,520 voice circuits.
So where do we get 75 million from? Bad math actually, at least as far as any telecom geek is concerned. If you take 4,800,000,000,000 bps and divide that by 64,000 bps you get exactly 75,000,000. This is very simplified though no matter what the technology being used is. It ignores any overhead in framing and other signaling. Be it traditional telecom circuits like DS3s or packet type networks, you're always going to have overhead. You also need signaling channels to control your voice traffic (unless you want to be old school and use in-band MF or DTMF or something, but I digress). If that's SIP or SS7 or Q.931 ISDN D-channels, you're still taking up space with it.
I guess all this says is what most people on Slashdot probably already know. Bandwidth is just a number. What you can do with it is an entirely different question.
Re:Yeah but (Score:5, Funny)
Or Godzilla decides he is hungry.
Parent
You know how these things go (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
What happens to the Ape after Godzilla is taken care of?
Apes are too hairy to just freeze to death you know... You should really think your plans through!
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
need a giant snake... that'll freeze to death in winter, and make excellent handbags
Re: (Score:3)
Pshh, that only happens in movies you unrealistic clod!
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know which parallel universe you're from, but in this one Japan isn't part of China.