Amazon Builds First Solo Subsea Cable Linking Maryland To Ireland (aboutamazon.com) 34
AWS today announced Fastnet, a subsea fiber-optic cable that will link Maryland's Eastern Shore to County Cork, Ireland. The project marks Amazon's first wholly-owned subsea cable system after previously participating in similar ventures through consortiums.
The cable will carry data at speeds exceeding 320 terabits per second. Amazon did not disclose construction costs but expects the system to begin operations in 2028. The company is burying the cable roughly one and a half meters deep across the ocean floor. Installers will bore a horizontal tunnel from shore to shore. Amazon has added protective steel wiring to guard against ship anchors and deliberate sabotage.
The cable will carry data at speeds exceeding 320 terabits per second. Amazon did not disclose construction costs but expects the system to begin operations in 2028. The company is burying the cable roughly one and a half meters deep across the ocean floor. Installers will bore a horizontal tunnel from shore to shore. Amazon has added protective steel wiring to guard against ship anchors and deliberate sabotage.
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So an American company will be connecting Ireland, one the countries in Europe with the highest concentraction of data centers, to Maryland, where NSA has their headquarters with a super high speed fiber? yeah, nah, as a European I strongly object to this idea. I long for the good ol' days when the Americans were our closest friends.
As an American, I miss the days when we could at least pretend that we were our own friends. Now it just seems like we're determined to make enemies even of ourselves. It makes me think the allies and friends thing was all a giant hoax, and we've finally gotten tired of trying to keep up the facade.
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I would change "we've finally gotten tired" to "our oligarchs have gotten tired", because really you and I have no voice in what's going on in our government at all any longer.
We honestly never did. They just got tired of pulling the smoke and mirrors routine. I mean, smoke and mirrors probably cost them a few pennies per billions, and that's sunk cost that's completely unnecessary.
Re:Maryland you say? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maryland is also across the Potomac River from Loudon County, Virginia; which lies to the west of Washington DC.
Loudon County, Virginia is where AWS us-east-1 region datacenters are, as well as AWS GovCloud.
Go to Google Maps and draw a line that goes west-northwest from Loudon County to the Atlantic Ocean, and then a direct line to Cork, Ireland - you will intersect with the Atlantic Ocean in Maryland.
No conspiracy here, just as straight of a line plotted on a sphere that they could manage to reduce material and right-of-way costs.
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That's assuming we live on a flat earth. A shorter line between County Cork and the US would have the US terminus much further north.
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A direct line between County Cork and Loudon VA does not go through the east coast of Maryland on a spherical earth, that was the only point I addressed. Even if you wanted to maximize how much is laid in the ocean as opposed to land, there are still shorter distances that would land you on at least in Delaware. While I am sure there are logistical reasons to do it where they are doing, that is irrelevant to my point.
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Running cable on land requires getting right-of-way and property easements, which requires government consent. The more government jurisdictional boundaries you cross, the more consent you need from various political organizations that may or may not be willing to help them out.
It would follow that they would try to minimize that as much as possible in order to cut down on all the bureaucratic noise and squabbling between various states, cities, counties, etc.
My guess is that they either chose a path that
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Amazon's DCs are in Virginia, Maryland is just in the way.
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Tomorrow's headline: "Amazon to eliminate Maryland"
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so is the Chesapeake Bay, for that matter.
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They're already planning on drilling a tunnel for hundreds of miles under an ocean. I think handling a bay that is tens of miles across won't be a problem.
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You're assuming that all land-based cable routes are equal in cost and time to create. That would be a silly assumption, as obtaining grants of right-of-way through various legal jurisdictions is a collection of bespoke bureaucratic and political processes, any one of which that fails dooms the whole project.
It would make sense for them to either lease some dark fiber that already exists that gets them to a suitable piece of property to start their tunnel bore, or to minimize the amount of jurisdictional n
Re:Maryland you say? (Score:4, Insightful)
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You don't have to think too hard to figure out what Amazon will do with it.
They have massive datacenters at either end, in Loudon County, Virginia (US-East-1, GovCloud) and Cork, Ireland.
This is going to be their own private backhaul connecting regions in North America and Europe.
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This is going to be their own private backhaul connecting regions in North America and Europe.
Will it have excess capacity that Amazon will lease? If no, then this cable has zero effect on Europe and North America. That was my point. I simply did not understand why the OP would have objections to a private companies building something that affects no one else.
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It's not that, Ire-Land is Catholic, so small wonder Mary-Land wants a connection.
"deliberate sabotage" (Score:3)
Sad to say but these days that is a real possibility.
Why do we, a supposedly intelligent species, make war rather than cooperate ? If you think that I am naive - please explain.
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Because some members of our species have not evolved sufficiently to understand what "enough" looks like.
It's the same mental disease that creates billionaires who already have more material wealth than ten generations of their progeny could ever spend, and yet they still have the drive to literally starve children in order to get tax breaks they don't need to aide in accumulating more wealth they don't need.
Buried? (Score:4, Interesting)
Where in the source article does it say anything about "burying the cable roughly one and a half meters deep" or "bore a horizontal tunnel"?! If they were going to bury this, surely they would trench, not bore. And it's not clear they are burying it at all. The infographic seems to show it on the surface of the ocean floor. And it shows that the cable is one and a half INCHES THICK, not meters deep. SMDH.
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Post on Slashdot seems poorly done, almost voice dictation. Who writes "one hundred and $44 million" instead of "$144 million"?
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AWS has become a high-value target for sabotage by foreign governments or major competitors, as we saw a few days ago an interruption in AWS services shuts down large swaths of our government and much of our corporate activity. I could easily imagine Ellison paying someone to cut AWS's cable to promote Oracle's pitiful excuse for cloud services.
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Or more reasonably: Russia or China "accidentally" dropping / dragging an anchor across it's path and crippling the US Government cloud-based operations for weeks by fucking over their prime cloud contractor.
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I'm quite sure that most of the really major cables are already mined so they can be destroyed in an instant (or threatened to be destroyed) in the case of open hostilities. The major maritime powers would be foolish not to, they're much too valuable an asset to an opponent's military to not take them into account and it takes too much time to move ships into position to do it if a hot war erupts.
Error in summary (Score:2)
I strongly suspect an error in the summary. I donâ(TM)t think itâ(TM)s technologically possible to horizontally bore a fiber conduit 1.5 meters deep across the entire Atlantic Ocean. Someone please explain whatâ(TM)s actually happening here.
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Yeah that sounds off. Probably mean digging at coastal shallower waters then just having it lay on the floor elsewhere, that's the standard.
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They mention it because they're not following the standard practice, they appear to intend to bury the entire cable rather than just the near-shore portions. Considering that AWS is now a major component of the US economy and supports huge swaths of the US government it's probably a good idea to protect it from sabotage, cables are easy and tempting targets.
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I'm sure they're going to trench and bury the cable, modern journalists are mostly scions of the wealthy families who have never worked in the real world so have no clue that "bore" and "trench" don't mean the same thing.
Maybe someone should explain to them ... (Score:2)