
Arctic Fibre Project to Link Japan and U.K - mmastrac
http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/arctic-fibre-project-to-link-japan-and-uk
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jedberg
This is great news for Alaskans. The internet there is terrible and ISPs do a
lot of caching that they shouldn't to make up for it (like setting the min TTL
for all DNS entries to 7 days regardless of what they get from the server).

Finally they'll be able to get decent internet without all the shenanigans!

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numair
That's insanity. A large number of Alaskans have to wait 7 days to see changes
to DNS? Is this practice prevalent anywhere else in the world?

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mytochar
For those of you hunting to see the length of the cable like I was, it's
15,600 km long. I wish they'd provided a top-down view rather than a lateral
view like they did, since that would make more sense and have the image look
shorter.

Anyway...

I wonder if this will have a positive impact on the arctic communities that
the cable goes through. Is there any history on technological booms and hubs
appearing in places where a new cable went through previously low-occupancy
areas?

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grecy
I work for the incumbent Telco in some of those Canadian arctic communities.

The price of their broadband is about to go down by at least an order of
magnitude. Speeds will also increase dramatically.

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bch
'grecy -- Bell? Let's hope the costs are driven down. I recall (as a former
Whitehorse, YT resident) seeing proposals (but not as big as this articles)
come and go, with no positive impact on consumers.

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grecy
The wholly owned subsidiary of Bell, yes.

It's looking more likely that the Yukon Government will run their own fiber
from Whitehorse->Skagway to tap into the fiber backbone there, cutting out
Northwestel.

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lifeisstillgood
I hate that the articles justification was "shaving 24ms off stock and
derivative orders" and love that HNs reaction is "how will this benefit local
communities".

Really HFT is just a sign that most of the action in finance produces minimal
net value - just changing hands. I am more and more beginning to see finance
as kissing cousins to real estate - it should be wiped out by transparency and
internet messaging.

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jacquesm
Middle-men are typically only replaced by newer, more efficient middle-men
that will be harder to dislodge than their predecessors.

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kalleboo
So will the Alaskans/Canadians who get online through this line have all their
traffic routed through Japan or the UK? Or will there be a line through Canada
somewhere straight down to the US?

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unimportant
Can someone enlighten me about the real interests behind this venture?

80k people, of whom only a fraction might actually be interested in purchasing
internet access is a really small amount compared to the huge cost of the
project.

Japanese people aren't very interested in non-japanese websites either, so
there is not a huge demand for additional bandwidth to Europe to my knowledge.

Did they get huge gov grants to pull this off or are there actually businesses
committed enough to bandwidth purchases that this is likely to be a profitable
project?

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peteretep
4th sentence: "but the investors and companies eager to send information—stock
trades, wire transfers—are so intent on earning a fraction-of-a-second
advantage over competitors that the US $850 million price tag for the
approximately 15,600-kilometer cable may well be worth it."

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unimportant
I doubt all of this takes much bandwidth though and I doubt they're willing to
invest huge sums for something everyone will have access to anyway after it's
completion.

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arethuza
"everyone will have access to"

What makes you think everyone will have access to all of the bandwidth on the
cable. It's pretty common for large companies to buy dedicated blocks on
bandwidth on long distance links for their own internal private networks and
such things are not cheap and often have maximum latency requirements that are
nothing to do with financial trading.

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unimportant
The line is 24 terrabit, so it's reasonable to assume that everyone will have
a chance to peer to it, as it's unlikely to be fully booked.

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Scaevolus
Non-blogspam link: [http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/arctic-fibre-
proje...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/arctic-fibre-project-to-
link-japan-and-uk)

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dang
Thanks! Changed.

