Transpacific Unity Fiber Optic Cable Leaves Japan 136
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!"
Yes! (Score:5, Funny)
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$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.
In related news... (Score:2)
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Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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It will be the longest tentacle ever to be related to porn! :D
Yeah but (Score:1, Troll)
That is until a ship drops anchor on top of it.
Re:Yeah but (Score:5, Funny)
Or Godzilla decides he is hungry.
You know how these things go (Score:2, Offtopic)
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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!
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need a giant snake... that'll freeze to death in winter, and make excellent handbags
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I would have thought it was obvious what happens to the giant ape.
It grabs a random female in skimpy clothing, climbs the Empire State Building, and gets shot down by bi-planes.
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Pshh, that only happens in movies you unrealistic clod!
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Dam (Score:5, Funny)
Even fiber optic cable is getting laid...
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Even fiber optic cable is getting laid...
Never mind. Your turn will come someday.
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Your turn will come someday
Not
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Even fiber optic cable is getting laid...
Never mind. Your turn will come someday.
His turn will come when he learns how to spell, damn it.
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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."
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Yeah, I've certainly found that my superior spelling abilities have given me great success with the ladies!
Not.
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Yeah, I've certainly found that my superior spelling abilities have given me great success with the ladies! Not.
As long as all you want to do is play scrabble your superior spelling skills will do fine.
Re:Dam (Score:4, Funny)
Never mind. Your turn will come someday.
...IN SEA BED!
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Yes but it is 10,000 km long.
Size matters, you know :-)
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But, as a friend of mine described fucking a girl: It's like throwing a salami in a corridor!
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.
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.
Re:How does that work, exactly? (Score:5, Interesting)
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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?
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How about... you know... shielding the the freaking fields?? ...and not make the animals go nuts. It's cheaper too.
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The engineers who design these things never thought of that. They just aren't as smart as you are.
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You know, we do so much to protect undersea cables from sharks. Why can't we spend the same effort protecting marriage [theonion.com] from sharks?
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Don't forget sharks, [...] and occasionally attack the cables.
With their lasers!
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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]
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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.
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Page 1 of 56
OK, this is starting to get ridiculous...
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Wikipedia has some great pictures of the different layers of undersea cables.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable [wikipedia.org]
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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
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For commercial networks, you're probably right. On a private network where your users are used to delay on phone networks, it makes more sense to route your voice traffic over the satellite links, though. Within the specific networks I've worked on, the satellite links are often more reliable. A 5 minute phone call isn't going to be finished any faster because you put it over a low-latency, high-bandwidth terrestrial link. That email attachment or map download will be significantly faster over the terrestri
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On the other hand, you can get to pretty much anywhere on the planet within 50ms with a cable. (In theory, disregarding delay at routing, and non-direct routes.)
Lets assume that light in a fiber travels at 2x10^8 m/s (light travels slower in fiber than in free space though i'm not sure how much slower offhand), according to wikipedia the earths cicumfrence is about 4x10^7 m, so halfway round the world would be 2x10^7 m.
so to get halfway arround the world would take about 100ms minimum, the round trip time (
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]
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This is a perfect opportunity to plug Neal Stephenson's excellent essay on fibre-optic cables: Mother Earth, Mother Board [wired.com]. It's well worth reading, being gripping, easy to get into, endlessly fascinating, and funny --- all the qualities that essays on cable laying usually aren't. He answers all your questions and more. (It also turned into research for Cryptonomicon.)
The short answers to your questions, though, are yes, yes, and by being very clever, respectively.
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Faster Access To Hulu! (Score:5, Funny)
Sweet, this will give me faster access to Hulu, Slacker, and all of the nice American websites.
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Thank you, Captain Obvious!
Surprisingly small sounding numbers (Score:3, Interesting)
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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.
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Traffic between east asian regions and the americas has always been extremely limited, and expensive. Honestly, as soon as you leave your own ISP's territory, traffic starts being very limited. This is helped by the fact that ISPs have deals between them to even out the cost, and that the vast majority of traffic stays in house, on top of having bigger content providers replicate their stuff around the world (google, youtube, microsoft, akamai...), but if it wasn't for that, Google or Microsoft alone would
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The reason it is smaller than you would think is a thing called reachability. While I do not work with submarine cables I have been doing fiber optic equipment for about 20 years. From a metro perspective the numbers seem small given DWDM systems that can achieve many channels of 40G and 100G but there are limitations particularly related to distance. I really am not sure what the amps are (I would guess mostly EDFAs and RAMAN amps plus some back to back amps for regen to clean the signal up) but the higher
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10gbit/s is the standard for high speed links, that'd be OC-192 or 10G Ethernet. 40gbit/s is out there for early adopters.
From some quick math I'm guessing it's 256 fiber cable with 122 40gbit/s links using repeaters and a half dozen pairs held in reserve for when a link goes bad.
It could be a few hundred 10gbit/s links over some form of WDM with amplifiers, though I doubt it because of the dispersion problems over this kind of distance.
I don't work with undesea fiber but I can assure you th
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I've never worked with anything longer than 160km without 3R regen or more than 40ch per pair.
Undersea stuff is a little out of my element. I would have thought DWDM would be handicapped by dispersion, unless they have optical MDUs and transponders built into the regen nodes to 3R regen each channel. That seems a little complex for a system that would require a boat to repair.
Thanks for the info, at any rate.
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More reduncancy is good... (Score:2)
...but it would be nice to have the landings more widely distributed, especially on the US Atlantic coast.
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Yes, but then they'd have to route the cable through the Panama Canal.
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No, they'd just have to not route 75% or so of them through New York.
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A faster and more direct tube for Chinese to receive US spam.
44u. http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/countries.lasso [spamhaus.org]
Wow! (Score:1, Offtopic)
Asian bathroom pron, without buffering!
Great Firewall... (Score:1)
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I don't know which parallel universe you're from, but in this one Japan isn't part of China.
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You seem to assume that it is impossible that a Chinese ISP might interconnect with a Japanese ISP for transit to the US.
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The way the summary says it, it's a Japan-America optic cable. I guess one goal would be to route around such problems.
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]
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But 56 pages, is there a diploma afterwards?
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No, but the writing really is so good it's worth reading.
Whoever said it had to be done in one sitting? ;)
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I was just purging a bunch of old Wired magazines. And I found this issue. I will save this one for ever!
The issue is a stark contrast to the wimpy magazine that Wired has become. That issue, with Stephenson's long superb article, is almost 300 pages long, more than twice the current issues. The November issue before it was also 300 pages with Bruce Sterling's Burning man article. Such great writing, such massive content. Where is it now?
Oh how the mighty have fallen !
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 $150M.
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Sounds pretty cheap to me, particularly when you consider the specialized ships and expertise and whatnot you require for this type of work. Perhaps the got a volume discount.
300 Million / 10,000 Km = 30,000$/Km
That is everything, including the cable.
I know it isn't the same thing but I know of underwater electrical cable that cost something like 10,000$/Foot... just to put it in perspective. (That was for a wind power project located on an island that had to run a power cable from their substation to the g
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)
This is Google's Glomar Explorer (Score:1)
I think this is just Google's Glomar Explorer [wikipedia.org]. I'm sure they are not interested at all to be mining all those data packets for intel. This is a complete altruistic - do no evil - venture to improve transatlantic relations
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Sure. They have no interest at all in reducing their costs.
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.
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Most Malaysian users' home broadband is capped to a measly maximum 4mbps because demand for bandwidth so far outstrips supply.
Sadly that is higher than many Americans.
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Yeah, but our neighbours across the southern bridge can get 100mbps [starhub.com], plus look at how happy they are in that photo. I mean, I understand why he's happy, but why are the girls so thrilled? Dude set up their 100mpbs service with a Linksys b/g router that can't push half that speed.
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.
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Voice conversations are 64 kbps? That seems pretty high, is that assuming fixed bitrate and not variable bitrate?
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That is the traditional standard for void calls, 8 bits per sample (though the sampling scale isn't linear giving a wider dynamic range), 8KHz sampling rate, no compression (phone network digitisation came before data compression of realtime voice was considered cost effective)
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This goes to the core of digital telephony. Analog circuits have a bandwidth of about 4 kHz since human voice falls into a pretty narrow band of audible frequencies between 300 and 3400 Hz. The Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem (usually just called the Nyquist Theorem) states that sampling rate needs to be at least twice the highest frequency, hence an 8 kHz sample rate (note, I'm summarizing here big time). The original digital voice circuits used an 8-bit sample. 8000 * 8 = 64,000.
ITU-T G.711 is the co
I thought... (Score:2)
I thought all these things went TO Japan, not from it. you know, Godzilla, Mothra, etc.
Have thay gotten pissed off enough that their sending out their own Transpacific Unity Fiber Optic Cable? Couldn't they have thought of a better and shorter name, like Transpa? It sounds like it doesn't even have atomic breath. What kind of a cheap monster is this, anyway?
Wii games (Score:2)
Great, now the asians can kick my ass at mario kart with less impact on global bandwidth...
How does this stuff _work_? (Score:2)
Has anyone a good link that explains, in some depth, how they do this? You have a ship (or more) and they haul the cable to the surface. OK. But what _exactly_ is involved?
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Stop trolling, gawd!
Obviously someone is not very well read.
Lets keep the gold for ourselves.