Google and Facebook's New Cable To Link Japan and Southeast Asia

Alphabet's Google and Facebook announced their participation in a new subsea cable system for 2024 set to improve internet connectivity across the Asia-Pacific region. Bloomberg: Dubbed Apricot, the infrastructure project will link Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Guam, the Philippines and Indonesia and help serve growing demand for broadband access and 5G wireless connectivity, Facebook said. In March, the company announced two new transpacific subsea cables connecting Singapore to the U.S. west coast, Bifrost and Echo, with Google participating in the latter. The Echo and Apricot cables are complementary submarine systems, Google said in a blog post, and will improve the resilience of Google Cloud and the company's other digital services. The new fiber-optic link spanning the Asia-Pacific has an initial design capacity of more than 190 terabits per second, according to Facebook.

Will China try to stop the Taiwan link?

[Joe_Dragon]

Will China try to stop the Taiwan link?

Re:

[John.Banister]

No. That's too expensive. First a "rogue individual" ransoms the line. Then, if the ransom is paid, keeps upping the rent. Finally the limit to what the market will bear is found and the line is explosively disconnected. By this time, the earlier ransom has paid for the explosives and the dive time. Of course, a government might protect it for you if you let them listen to all the traffic.

How many fiber pairs?

[RemindMeLater]

to get 190Tbit?

Re:

[Tim the Gecko]

I can't find the number for the Apricot cable, but Google's transatlantic cable [google.com] has 12 fiber pairs giving 250Tbps.

So presumably

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Of course non-FB and non-Google operators will be given equal opportunities to access the cables, yes?

Re:

[UnknowingFool]

I am sure they get as much access as my neighbors get to the paved paths I created in my backyard.

Re:

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Well, it may not be so clear-cut: some countries may impose the cable operators to make some of the bandwidth available for general use. Kind of like if you have a public path on your private property and you have to grant right of way to the public, even though it's your land and you may not want to.

Re:

[UnknowingFool]

The main difference is that generally right of way grants are primarily due to a lack of alternatives. In this case there are other cables, this one happens to be the newest and fastest.

Wow

[sonicmerlin]

Do these cables actually sink to the bottom of the ocean (just imaginging it is scary)? Do they ever encounter fish or plant interference on the way to the bottom?

How do they pull these cables up for repair if something goes wrong?

Re:

[Tim the Gecko]

Do these cables actually sink to the bottom of the ocean (just imaginging it is scary)?

Yes. Depending on how "mountainous" the sea bed is, they can hang suspended between ridges, but otherwise they are lying on the bottom. The combination of lying on pointy things and ocean currents can cause the cables to be abraded, so the path is chosen to avoid bad spots like that.

Do they ever encounter fish or plant interference on the way to the bottom?

No. There have been cables that sharks liked to chew on, but I think that is less of a problem now.

How do they pull these cables up for repair if something goes wrong?

Here's how. [k-kcs.co.jp]