How the US is Pushing China Out of the Internet's Plumbing (ft.com) 30
Experts say the subsea cable market is in danger of dividing into eastern and western blocs amid fears of espionage and geopolitical tensions. From a report: Nearly 1.4mn kilometres of metal-encased fibre criss-crosses the world's oceans, speeding internet traffic seamlessly around the globe. The supply and installation of these cables has been dominated by companies from France, the US and Japan. The Chinese government started successfully penetrating the global market, but consecutive US administrations have since managed to freeze China out of large swathes of it. This was ostensibly because of concerns of espionage and worries about what Beijing might do to disrupt strategic assets operated by Chinese companies in the event of a conflict. Despite being routinely blocked from international subsea cable projects involving US investment, Chinese companies have adapted by building international cables for China and many of its allied nations. This has raised fears of a dangerous division in who owns and manages the infrastructure underpinning the global web.
In 2018, Amazon, Meta and China Mobile agreed to work together on a cable connecting California to Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. But a spate of manoeuvres in Washington to block Chinese participation in US cables led to China Mobile pulling out of the consortium. Meta and Amazon filed a new application for the system in 2021, this time with no Chinese investment, no connection to Hong Kong, and a new name: Cap-1. Then, last year, the application for Cap-1 was withdrawn altogether, even though most of the 12,000km cable had already been built. China's original involvement remained a security concern for the US government, according to two people briefed on the discussions. "There are hundreds of millions of dollars sunk in the Pacific," said a person involved in the aborted project. Over the last five years, as tensions between the two countries have mounted and fears have grown in Washington about the risks of espionage, the US government has sought to pull apart an interwoven network of internet cables that had developed through international collaboration over decades.
In 2018, Amazon, Meta and China Mobile agreed to work together on a cable connecting California to Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. But a spate of manoeuvres in Washington to block Chinese participation in US cables led to China Mobile pulling out of the consortium. Meta and Amazon filed a new application for the system in 2021, this time with no Chinese investment, no connection to Hong Kong, and a new name: Cap-1. Then, last year, the application for Cap-1 was withdrawn altogether, even though most of the 12,000km cable had already been built. China's original involvement remained a security concern for the US government, according to two people briefed on the discussions. "There are hundreds of millions of dollars sunk in the Pacific," said a person involved in the aborted project. Over the last five years, as tensions between the two countries have mounted and fears have grown in Washington about the risks of espionage, the US government has sought to pull apart an interwoven network of internet cables that had developed through international collaboration over decades.
1.4mn kilometres (Score:2)
what does that even mean? Is it 1.4 Gm?
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That's how I read it. What's the point in having metric prefixes if nobody is going to use them? Might as well have said "Nearly 1.4kkkm..." (Though that's a very unfortunate prefix.)
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They should have just given us the big middle finger and measured it in football fields.
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That's how I read it. What's the point in having metric prefixes if nobody is going to use them? Might as well have said "Nearly 1.4kkkm..." (Though that's a very unfortunate prefix.)
Like how Europeans say that the distance from Berlin to Paris is 1 Mm. No one actually says 1,000 km. Or how all Europeans talk about temperature in kelvin, because that's the "right" way to say things.
Pedantic use of metric units is useful for scientific calculations. Much less so for daily life, where people just use the units that they can internalize in their minds.
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That's the sound one makes when they see how big the impact is: "Gm!"
hi from Europe (Score:1)
In Europe we use SI units, and we measure large distances over the Earth in km. As it turns out, "m" is an SI unit, and "k" is an SI prefix, thus it is ok.
It is 35x around the Earth. But forget it, if you are from USA, as I'm not willing to argue about the shape of the Earth.
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Huh? Most people in the US think the earth is round. I'm pretty sure there are flat earthers in europe, too.
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Yet I still get surprised when I find some opinions spread in US.
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> 1.4mn kilometres what does that even mean? Is it 1.4 Gm?
"The abbreviation of millions is now 'mn' instead of 'm'. One of the main reasons is to benefit text-to-speech software, which reads out the 'm' as metres instead of millions, confusing visually impaired readers. It also comes into line with our style for billion (bn) and trillion (tn)." - https://aboutus.ft.com/press_r... [ft.com]
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It's not even listed in the 26 definitions on wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It's on Wiktionary however. Saying it's used in some countries only (chiefly Britain, Commonwealth except Canada, Ireland)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki... [wiktionary.org]
Units (Score:2)
> 1.4mn kilometres
What?
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"What the hell is a jigowatt?"
I think you must have misheard "Jigglewatt"
Re:Units (Score:5, Funny)
m = milli = 1x10^-3
n = nano = 1x10^10-9
kilo = 1x10^3
mnkm = millinanokilometers = 1x10^-9
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I expected nothing less from this site. :D
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The short length of those under-sea cables really helps with international latency. Amazing!
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Who gives a fuck about the "mn" (Score:2)
The article is once again behind a paywall. Quality stuff guys.
End goal (Score:2)
Disengage from and isolate China and Russia until they get taken over by even crazier nationalist nutcases who decide to press a red button?
US pulling up the drawbridge (Score:2)
Laying siege to themselves basically.
I'm curious how that will go both economically and in terms of US geopolitical influence in the rest of the world.
The British were doing this 100 years ago (Score:1)
They wanted to ensure that they had secure and reliable Telegraph cables in time of war. They ran at about 0.00000001 Gigabits, but carried a lot of information.
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A series of tubes? (Score:2)
Or is it a dump truck? I forget.
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It's a station wagon... Damn millennials...
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
âAndrew S. Tanenbaum, July 16, 1985