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The Internet Network

Google's New Subsea Cable Between the US and Europe is Now Online 56

Google, together with its partner SubCom, today announced that the company's privately owned Dunant subsea cable between Virginia Beach, Virginia and Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez on the French Atlantic coast is now operational. From a report: Google first announced this project, which was named after the first Noble Peach Price winner and founder of the Red Cross, Henry Dunant, back in the middle of 2018. At the time it expected the project to go live in 2020, but besides dealing with the complications of spanning a long cable between continents, the project leaders probably didn't budget for a global pandemic at the time. The almost 4,000-mile cable has a total capacity of 250 terabits per second -- or enough to transmit the "entire digitized Library of Congress three times every second" (though maybe using Library of Congress data size references is starting to feel a bit antiquated at this point?). Unlike some older cables, Dunant uses 12 fiber pairs, coupled with a number of technical innovations around maximizing its bandwidth, to achieve these numbers.

"Google is dedicated to meeting the exploding demand for cloud services and online content that continues unabated," said Mark Sokol, senior director of Infrastructure, Google Cloud. "With record-breaking capacity and transmission speeds, Dunant will help users access content wherever they may be and supplement one of the busiest routes on the internet to support the growth of Google Cloud. Dunant is a remarkable achievement that would not have been possible without the dedication of both SubCom and Google's employees, partners, and suppliers, who overcame multiple challenges this year to make this system a reality."
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Google's New Subsea Cable Between the US and Europe is Now Online

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  • by Jaegs ( 645749 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @12:36PM (#61023826) Homepage Journal

    Well, that's just peachy.

    • by dark.nebulae ( 3950923 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @12:43PM (#61023862)

      A new low for MSMASH. I guess he now doesn't need to read anything, just submit something and he'll post it as-is.

    • Peach be on you.
    • Presumably, the ./ editors were unaware of the Nobel Peace Prize that Henry Dunant was also awarded, and therefore did not see the necessity of checking whether the noble fruit award was a real thing.

      • Presumably, the ./ editors were unaware of the Nobel Peace Prize that Henry Dunant was also awarded, and therefore did not see the necessity of checking whether the noble fruit award was a real thing.

        No,it was the Noble Peach Price. Given the surname of the author (Lardinois) I am guessing that would be in francs.

    • Maybe that was data corruption on the overseas cable from St Petersburg.
      • by Muros ( 1167213 )

        Maybe that was data corruption on the overseas cable from St Petersburg.

        Google should listen more to Marjorie Taylor Greene. She's been warning anyone who will listen about international cables.

    • It appears that way in the techcrunch article and /. is quoting the article.

      What's so funny 'bout peach, love and understanding?
    • by rnturn ( 11092 )

      Once again... the lack of red squigglies makes someone look, well, bad. You need to actually proofread -- preferably out loud -- and silliness like this will get caught.

    • I hear it's a new Nobel handed out by the state of Georgia.

      • by Muros ( 1167213 )

        I hear it's a new Nobel handed out by the state of Georgia.

        No, the Presidents of the United States of America are in charge of the Peaches.

    • Ok, it's not quite there yet, but these GPT-3 generated articles are still improving, just give it time.

  • by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @12:38PM (#61023836)
    everything passing over their cable to feed product into their info marketing and sales operation.
    • Yea, but imagine the latency improvement for gaming!

    • everything passing over their cable to feed product into their info marketing and sales operation.

      Google outright owns 2 cables between the USA and Europe and has financial interest in 10 others. There are no new privacy implications from this cable.

      This post brought to you via SSL because it's not 1999 anymore, feel free to market the gibberish you see as much as you want.

  • Shit, if I knew they was a Peach prize I would have tried harder in school.

    • Nah. It's the Poisonous Pits that keep the Peach Prize from becoming a thing (except in Georgia). "Poisonous Pits" - good name for a death metal band?

  • Give me your data, your information,
    Your huddled GDPR yearning to be free,
    The wretched privacy of your teeming shore.
    Send these, the homeless bits, belong to me,
    I lift my lamp beside the Nosuch Agency!

    • Actually, the first thought that went through my head was did the NSA need to send the USS Jimmy Carter to tap it, or did the NSA strong-arm Google to build in a tap for them.

      I'm thinking the latter.

  • by cavalamar ( 134080 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @12:56PM (#61023928)

    Are they going to carry any public traffic?

    Or is it limited to google-cloud traffic only?

    • There is no difference anymore with the cloud providers. If it is cheaper than the alternative it will be used for transit by the software defined network crowd. Honestly in my part of the corp america if we are transting much more than voice packets and replication from London to Chicago we are looking for a misconfigured application someplace.

      Depending on what you do, what we use to pay out the nose to long haul is taken care of by a CDN for tiny fractions of what the bandwidth were to cost if we ha
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Sounds like it will carry public traffic as well as TFA says that Orange (internet services company in France) has been granted a never ending licence to use part of it.

  • ...enough to transmit the "entire digitized Library of Congress three times every second" (though maybe using Library of Congress data size references is starting to feel a bit antiquated at this point?)

    The Libraries of Congress storage reference was never antiquated. It was just stupid, as the average person doesn't have a damn clue as to how much this actually is. Yesterday, or today.

    If I told you the library had over 15 million items, does that sound completely ridiculous or realistic? What if I said it had over 50 million items? Would you believe they warehouse over 170 million? (Yes, I was today years old when I learned about this too.)

    • How many "olympic-sized swimming pools" is a Library of Congress?

      • by taustin ( 171655 )

        And how many smoots long is it?

      • by cusco ( 717999 )

        The Library of Congress is 2,100,000 square feet, which if you assume 8 foot ceilings would be 16,800,000 cubic feet. Since there are 88,000 cubic feet in an Olympic swimming pool that comes out to just under 191 pools. Some of the public galleries would have taller ceilings though, so we could probably round it off to 200 Olympic pools in volume. Now if you were to fill it with wine that would come out to 2,095,238 hogsheads, but if you used beer that would be 2,444,444. I have no idea how many furlong

  • by Mostly a lurker ( 634878 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @01:33PM (#61024126)

    As noted in the article, measuring bandwidth in terms of Libraries of Congress transfers is not ideal, and also does not allow us to directly measure progress over time. I propose using analogies based on 5-bit punched paper tape. (Originally, transatlantic communication cables were telegraph cables connected to teletype devices that punched the messages being sent., so it is a more direct comparison. The very first 1858 cable allowed data to be transmitted at the rate of one character every two minutes.) 5-bit punched tape has a "bandwidth" of 50 bits per inch (5-bits wide and 10 rows per inch). Thus, 250 terabits will occupy 78,914,141 miles (127,000,000 km) of punched tape. So, to send 250 terabits using punched paper tape would require a length of tape stretching 3,170 times around the earth or 330 times the distance to the moon or over double the distance to Mars at closest approach. A teletype would need to feed the tape as it was punched at less than half the speed of light, but it is still probably best that we have found alternative ways of transmitting messages over the last 150 years.

  • Noble Peach Price? (Score:5, Informative)

    by kbahey ( 102895 ) on Wednesday February 03, 2021 @01:39PM (#61024158) Homepage

    What the heck?

    Techcrunch has : "Noble Peach Price" instead of "Nobel Peace Prize".

    And Slashdot carried that verbatim ...

    No functioning editors on either web site ...

    • "Techcrunch has : "Noble Peach Price" instead of "Nobel Peace Prize".

      And Slashdot carried that verbatim ...

      No functioning editors on either web site ..."

      You missed the 2 dozen jokes about it a bit more above.

  • We should just start measuring internet speeds in petabits/second.... Time to make a call to Comcast to see if they can increase my home internet to a few millionths of a petabit/second.
  • by PPH ( 736903 )

    I Googled it and found nothing [slashdot.org].

  • That seems pretty small to lay considering the great expense and effort...just 24 strands. I'd have through at LEAST 24 pair...dead minimum!

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Undersea cabling is a bit thicker than the run-of-the-mill stuff that runs in the ROW along the highway.
      Each fiber is in several layers of jacketing and padding.
      Each pair is in several layers of jacketing and padding.
      Each 'lit' pair is usually accompanied with one or more 'dark' pairs used for backup/failover.
      Then you have space for repeater power feeds.
      Armoring against both nature and folks that might like to tap it for it's 'pretty glow'.

      Meaning - your 12-strands of glass are packaged in a bundle that can

  • So I'm thinking eventually Google will control all online traffic entering and exiting the United States and will use its artificial intelligence algorithm as a way to "traffic shape" censorship to fit any narrative, rewrite history, then out one side of their mouths will push stereotyping, generalizing, and the profiling of certain unwanted groups due to their unapproved political or spiritual beliefs while out the other side of their mouths teach that stereotyping, profiling, and making generalizations ar

    • So I'm thinking this thing called "encryption" exists and while a subset of that traffic can and likely is targeted by feds or branched off to NSA, they can't capture and decrypt everything.

      inb4 metadata, which they already have, but what is an IP these days?

  • Noble Peach Price? I'm guessing a few bucks per bushel... Well, they're noble, so maybe tens of bucks for that variety.

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