
The future of undersea Internet cables: Are big tech companies forming a cartel? - okket
https://blog.apnic.net/2019/04/03/the-future-of-undersea-internet-cables-are-big-tech-companies-forming-a-cartel/
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KaiserPro
Its not a cartel, Telecom is the cartel, its just plain cheaper and more
reliable to do it yourself, at scale.

This should be played against the background of a lot of transit providers
being consumed into the twin blackholes of GTT and Level3.

Dealing with them is a massive massive pain. They are almost always
universally incompetent.

Then there are peering agreements. In the US its all a bit wonky, as it costs
to do anything. As far as I'm aware there are no coop style internet
exchanges, which means that peering is prohibitively expensive.

else where, in normal land, most places are coops, which means you pay a small
fee and negotiate peering directly with other peers.

Given that with the concentration of traffic around 4/5 company's datacenters
it makes perfect sense to tap directly into those.

Having a complete network under your control, with your QoS working globally
right up to the last mile, is a worthy goal. Being <10ms away from 90% of your
customers is worth the cost.

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mattrp
I think it's a bit far fetched to describe the current situation as a cartel.
First, what is the function of a cartel? It's to coordinate supply to keep
prices high. Do we really think that anything the content players have done so
far would indicate any of them are trying to set pricing higher? Hardly.
Second, the reason they are taking positions / building their own is that
there isn't a business case to build these cables without them.

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yummypaint
The industry as a whole has been trying to do this by attacking net
neutrality. Things like metered plans create artificial scarcity and allow
companies to increase the price of switching packets.

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samstave
Dude, the ping i get on my facebook atlantic cable is like 2ms between here
and the .eu shard.

What are you getting on that other link?!

Ssure they spy on all my stuff but look at that ping!

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wbl
2e-3s*3e8 m/s=6e5m. So no, you are not going to get 2ms transatlantic ping.

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TheSpiceIsLife
Light travels something like 30% slower in fibre optic cable than vacuum.

So would be more like 420 kilometres for 2ms.

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ummonk
And that's round trip, so ~200 km away.

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Robotbeat
One benefit of all these Low Earth Orbit satellite megaconstellations is they
can completely bypass terrestrial internet backbones. Starlink and Telesat LEO
in particular. And (in principle) get _lower_ latency to servers on the other
side of the planet due to the faster speed of light in vacuum vs glass (and
perhaps a more direct route).

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Scoundreller
It’s not just the faster speed in vacuum vs glass, but the route can be a lot
more direct.

An undersea cable will go through (or around) all kinds of trenches or peaks
because the sea bed isn’t flat. And it needs to have some stress relief
imperfect routing to handle shifting.

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mattrp
just remember the underlying unit economics of LEO vs fiber. A repeated system
is generally thought to be capable of 40+Tbps / pair where as LEO might be
good for gigabit at best.

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Robotbeat
I have no idea where you got that figure. GSO birds do can ~1Tbps already
(EDIT: Viasat’s birds, for instance: [https://corpblog.viasat.com/viasats-
global-satellite-constel...](https://corpblog.viasat.com/viasats-global-
satellite-constellation-well-on-its-way-to-completion/)). LEO is a factor of
50-100 closer. Inverse square law and all that means for the same aperture and
power, you can get far better bandwidth.

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koheripbal
GSO is very high orbit (22K miles) and therefor has much higher latency. The
lower orbit (100-1K miles) constellations are lower bandwidth because of the
high _angular_ speed of travel removes the ability to do directional (high
powered) transmissions.

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Robotbeat
Incorrect. The LEO constellations use phased arrays (or similar) and are able
to slew at whatever angular rate you could want as they are electronically
steered. Both for the terminals and for the satellite side. Iridium has used
phases arrays in its LEO constellation for decades now, and the newer
constellations like OneWeb and Starlink use phases arrays on the terminal side
as well.

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jrockway
I don't think this is a cartel. Big users of data decided "we don't want to
pay the price that the owner of the cable is offering, so we'll just build our
own." Then they built their own.

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Scoundreller
The issue with an over-build first approach to competition is visible with
airlines. If you see that a particular handful of routes are highly priced,
you can set up your own airline. But the incumbent can just drive you out of
business with their other markets and bankrupt you.

Then nobody risks trying to take you on again.

It's nice that big users of data may be bigger than the telecoms, but when
that isn't the case, the market fails when building your own links on a larger
network of oligopolists.

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ummonk
Wait, where does this happen? The airline industry seems to have a high degree
of competition and very good pricing for consumers. Which makes sense given
that it isn't an industry conducive to natural monopolies. The cost to open a
route isn't that high compared to the cost to operate the route, and the cost
of operation scales with revenue from the route; there isn't much in the way
of fixed capital required for a route.

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jillesvangurp
IMHO having more players in this market, which so far is dominated by state
operated telcos and de-facto monopolists like AT&T is actually improving
things. The more independently operating companies there are operating their
own cables, the more room there is for free market to operate.

That being said, I do believe the notion of big corporations with pre-existing
near monopolies on e.g. search or online retail with yearly revenues exceeding
the gross national product of most nations on this planet, is not necessarily
good for a free market. There have been some demands for some of these
companies to be broken up and IMHO that would actually be a good thing. Calls
for that are only going to get stronger.

~~~
samcday
> The more independently operating companies there are operating their own
> cables, the more room there is for free market to operate.

> That being said, I do believe the notion of big corporations with pre-
> existing near monopolies on e.g. search or online retail with yearly
> revenues exceeding the gross national product of most nations on this
> planet, is not necessarily good for a free market

To me, those two statements sound contradictory. Do you want a "free market"
or don't you? If it's a free market, you have to expect that the organizations
with the deepest pockets that stand to gain the most from larger internet
pipes are going to be the ones to invest in it.

I'm _certainly_ no expert, but it seems to me that the more ideal situation
would be that core infrastructure like the internet is driven primarily by
public money. The obvious argument against that is maybe it won't grow as
phenomenally fast as it has, but maybe we don't really need to be able to
stream those 4K cat videos when, like you said, in doing so we're empowering
for-profit organizations to grow larger than the GDP of many nations.

> There have been some demands for some of these companies to be broken up and
> IMHO that would actually be a good thing.

At least we're in 100% agreement here!

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jillesvangurp
They are not necessarily contradicting statements. Google and Amazon have near
monopolies on another thing than fiber optic cables. Neither is trying to
monopolize fiber optic cables. But of course them using their wealth and power
as a near monopoly in their own fields to basically work around another near
monopoly from telcos so they can create a cost advantage to re-enfore their
own monopolies is kind of not really a free market any more. In the same way
coercing city, state and country governments into giving them tax advantages
also helps them compete unfairly.

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sdfsdfsdfsdf3
Does it really matter if we have an excess of capacity when incumbents own the
last mile and prevent open peering close to home and/or charge ridicious per
mbit prices for transit or private peering. A little up the ladder for example
you can already get HE in AUS
[https://pop.he.net/?country=Australia](https://pop.he.net/?country=Australia)
so think sub $1/mbit pricing but its all pointless* as 90% of the eyeball ISPs
won't peer with them. *pointless is an exaggeration but doesn't help content
providers or end users

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godelmachine
Forming a cartel?

Aren’t they already a cartel, having divided the oceanic territories &
protecting each other’s vested interests?

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kwindla
Obligatory reference to "Mother Earth Mother Board," one of the all-time best
pieces of long-form tech writing, Neal Stephenson's gonzo journalism
exploration of undersea cable laying.

"Our method was not exactly journalism nor tourism in the normal sense but
what might be thought of as a new field of human endeavor called hacker
tourism: travel to exotic locations in search of sights and sensations that
only would be of interest to a geek."

[https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/](https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/)

~~~
jds375
Id also recommend Cryptonomicon by Stephenson. Undersea cables is a major
subject in the novel. It also touches on many things that have become relevant
today despite the book being written 1999 (cryptocurrency, encryption, etc).
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38897904](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38897904)

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kingkawn
Doesn’t matter we can nationalize their assets when the time is right

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fosco
I like this cable map
[https://dev.networkatlas.com/](https://dev.networkatlas.com/)

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gioscarab
As soon as the monopoly will be in place, a decentralized multiple-media
network based on a distributed privately handled network infrastructure will
be already available. I am working on this problem since 2010, see PJON:
[https://github.com/gioblu/PJON](https://github.com/gioblu/PJON)

~~~
candu
And will that network include undersea cabling, satellites, or some equivalent
means of global connection? I doubt it: these are all extraordinarily
expensive. Even the cheapest approach imaginable - say, a series of network
repeaters on rafts - is still quite expensive, not to mention incredibly
brittle.

I'm all for distributed networks, local meshes, and other initiatives to
reduce network hardware centralization. That said, these are not perfect
substitutes for a global network. For instance: I'm based in Canada, and my
work currently deals with digital service deployment in government. As part of
that work, I occasionally need to refer to the UK's Government Digital Service
(GDS) website. No amount of local network infrastructure can help me do that:
I rely on the trans-Atlantic cables to access this.

Now, you could imagine mirroring the GDS website across a number of these
local distributed networks, forming what is in essence a CDN under distributed
ownership. That might help me right now, but: in a network monopoly world, how
would you mirror content on an ongoing basis in the first place? Who would
maintain such a mirror? How would you pay for the immense storage
requirements? (Or, failing that, how would you decide which corner of the
Internet to mirror?)

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gioscarab
PJON Is done to leverage of whatever form of connectivity (wires, light
pulses, radio waves, other protocols) even the internet. For now people
implementing a PJON network generally hops through the internet when required.

Although, I have a great trust in the maker's and open-source community
worldwide. As you can see a lot of people experimenting with electronics and
building stuff have unveiled the truth behind the scams that we now call
"consumer electronics products" and they are starting to build and buy open-
hardware that runs open-software.

A privately built and maintained network infrastructure where communication is
free and if required anonymous will be the next demand.

There is a large movement worldwide, many are doing so already, there is just
a lack of standards and protocols designed around those requirements. PJON is
an attempt to fill this gap.

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tgp22
_Between 2016 and 2020 about 100 new cables have been laid or planned. The
primary reason for new cables is the demand for bandwidth. But it is difficult
to pinpoint the source of this demand._

Memes i say. Memes.

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trentino2
It’s amazing to me that nobody ever mentions ocean plastic pollution when
undersea cables come up.

~~~
wnevets
Why would they? the percentage undersea cable makes up has to be insanely
small.

