
Google Invests in $300M Submarine Cable to Improve Connection Between Japan, US - swohns
http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/11/google-invests-in-300m-submarine-cable-to-improve-connection-between-japan-and-the-us/?ncid=rss
======
pchristensen
Obligatory link to "Mother Earth, Motherboard" whenever submarine cables are
mentioned:

[http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html](http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html)

Best 50 page article you'll read this year.

~~~
sithadmin
This really makes me nostalgic.

I miss the days when Wired actually had decent content.

~~~
dmix
Well, journalism was also a good middle-class job back then. Magazines don't
pay like they used to. Like upfront budgets to write a high-quality long
piece.

Reading Hunter S Thompsons letters from the 60s as a freelance journalist you
can tell he was able to spend time writing quality articles, with the odd hack
job thrown in for extra cash. I highly doubt there are many full-time journos
left like that.

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DigitalSea
I would love to see Google do this for Australia and New Zealand as well. Both
countries are at the end of the line (so-to-speak) and would benefit greatly
from something like this. Our Internet is pretty rubbish and expensive, and
while that might be in part due to limited choice of ISP's, archaic Government
policies and equipment, bandwidth is a HUGE problem.

~~~
ripdog
Australia yes, but please don't include New Zealand in that! Our internet is
roaring along thanks to enlightened regulation and significant government
investment. We're half-way through rolling out a GPON fibre network which will
cover 75% of the population by 2019. I'm on 100/50mbit fibre right now,
looking forward to a 1000/500 upgrade before the end of the year - totally
uncapped and unshaped.

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smileysteve
I wonder what the difference is in the technology of the 3.3TB/s cable and the
60TB/c cable, just strands? (approx 20 more?)

~~~
jpmattia
That jumped out at me too. My wild guess is that the older fiber is a 10G
system, the new one is 40G.

From [1] > Unity cable system consists of eight fiber pairs, has design
capacity up to 7.68 Tbps, with each fiber pair operating at 96x10G DWDM
system.

From [2] > the SJC cable system consists of 6 fiber pairs with the initial
design capacity of 28 terabits per second,

Taking a guess that there are 96x40Gb/s x 6 fibers gets you to 23 Tb/s, so in
the right ballpark. (Wavelength spacing on a fiber is different between 40G
and 10G, so this is a bit of a shot in the dark.)

Caveat: 40G used to be near and dear to my heart (Big Bear Networks), so
everything pretty much looks like that nail to my hammer.

[1] [http://submarinenetworks.com/systems/trans-
pacific/unity](http://submarinenetworks.com/systems/trans-pacific/unity) [2]
[http://www.globe.com.ph/press-room/globe-regional-
connectivi...](http://www.globe.com.ph/press-room/globe-regional-connectivity)

~~~
btoptical
Nope this will be 100G per wave not 40G. 40G was a stop-gap technology that
never really shipped in large volume. With the advent of coherent optical,
everyone just went to 100G (eg. Infinera, Ciena, Alcatel-Lucent)

EDIT: One caveat, depending on a particular link many of these systems will
run at half-rate. A lot of legacy cables today are running BPSK at 50G in 2
waves (25G/wave) due to nonlinearities.

~~~
jpmattia
> Nope this will be 100G per wave not 40G.

Do you have a link for this? Interesting news if true. Also: Things running at
50G used to be OC768 with error correction, ie 40G of data + 10G of overhead.
Has this changed? At some point, the framers have to deal with standardized
bitstreams, so is the 50G one part of an inverse mux or combined up from 10G?

Edit: It's been a while. Sorry for the bazillion questions, but curiousity is
getting the better of me. Are folks really running 100G coherent undersea
currently?

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btoptical
See for example: [http://newswire.telecomramblings.com/2013/01/telstra-
global-...](http://newswire.telecomramblings.com/2013/01/telstra-global-and-
infinera-first-to-demonstrate-soft-decision-fec-over-4200km-hawaii-to-
california-submarine-link/)

So you have to separate the "wet" plant from the terminal gear. The speed of
the terminal gear is completely disconnected from the wet plant these days.
Nobody replaces wet plant to upgrade capacity. They run Ciena, Infinera,
Alcatel gear over Tyco's old line system.

Essentially the issue with upgrading over the wet plant is basically the
presence of nonlinearities on the fiber. The links are not noise limited. Some
of these fibers are still running 10G OOK in half the band and that on NZ-DSF
that's used for submarine cables basically causes huge nonlinear penalties.
The new subsea fiber is 22ps/nm-km and essentially larger effective diameter
for reducing nonlinear penalty.

[http://www.corning.com/opticalfiber/products/vascade_fibers....](http://www.corning.com/opticalfiber/products/vascade_fibers.aspx)

BTW, I also worked at BBN

~~~
jpmattia
> See for example:

Thanks for the link. I confess I'm a little amazed that Infinera is the basis
for running 100G coherent single wavelengths. That's great progress. (Edit-
See below)

> Essentially the issue with upgrading over the wet plant is basically the
> presence of nonlinearities on the fiber

Yes, and there's great incentive to utilize legacy fiber if possible.

(BTW I managed to screw up my comment above when I edited. I had written:
Usually the undersea guys are a generation behind, partly because of the need
to send a destroyer-looking ship out for any repairs.)

> BTW, I also worked at BBN

Hello! and hope all is well, whoever you are. :)

Edit: The infinera 500G PIC in the PR from Telstra is running its basic
bitstreams at 25G and muxing them up -
[http://www.lightreading.com/optical/dwdm/infinera-
unleashes-...](http://www.lightreading.com/optical/dwdm/infinera-unleashes-
coherent-100g/d/d-id/689914)

~~~
btoptical
Yes. It's a 100G service though. Infinera runs on 25G spacing so at 25G dual
wave dual polarization is 100G in the same spectral efficiency as single wave.

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dchuk
That seems really cheap for such a crucial piece of infrastructure that has to
wrap a quarter of the way around the earth

~~~
ender7
While manufacturing the cable is expensive, actually laying it (in that
particular part of the ocean) is not that challenging. They essentially just
drive a ship along that path while slowly spooling out the cable from the
rear. They have the advantage that that stretch of ocean doesn't contain much
of anything to plan around.

~~~
pchristensen
Anyone interested in the process (or just loves captivating writing about
technical subjects), read
[http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html](http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html).
Can't recommend it enough.

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turboquant
A sensor array along the cable line monitoring marine health would yield a
data goldmine.

~~~
nyrina
Totally. But who's willing to pay for that?

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maxmcd
This might be an absurd question, but I can't think of a better place to ask
it.

In my mind there's a huge mental disconnect between computers
(servers/personal computers) and infrastructure like this.

Could someone provide insight on when/how these types of high-throughput
cables are used? How the process is managed, by who, and how on earth all
those bits are lined up at such a high speed.

I understand they're core to the structure of the internet, but I couldn't
explain how information ends up in them to my grandmother.

edit: looks like the linked wired article is a good place to start

~~~
stephen_g
Routers. Routers everywhere...

The internet is broken up into different networks, each one being an
'Atonomous System' (AS). These networks are all connected to other ASes at
various interconnection points, such as an Internet Exchange (IX) or another
point-of-presence (PoP). At these points, a router on the edge of one network
is connected to a router on the edge of another.

These 'edge' or 'border' routers talk to each other with a protocol called BGP
(Border Gateway Protocol). This lets them 'advertise' all the routes that you
can reach through that router to other routers (like, "hey, you can get to
54.24.0.0/16 at cost x through me").

Internally, each AS will also use an internal routing protocol, such as Open
Shortest Path First (OSPF) or iBGP (the internal version of Border Gateway
Protocol) to internally advertise this information along with information
about how to get between internal routers to work out where to go. So if you
have a packet at your grandmother's house, it will hit the first router that
her cable or DSL is connected to, use something like OSPF to work out the best
(fastest) path through the network to a border router, and then from there the
best (probably cheapest!) path to the destination based on the information it
got from neighboring routers with BGP.

This is because there are two ways that ASes will interconnect - either
peering, where you say "we'll let you send traffic into your network for free
if we can send data into yours", and transit, where you actually pay. There
may be two paths to get to your destination, and one might be shorter but more
expensive in transit, so the cheaper path might get chosen, depending on the
priorities of the ISP.

An undersea cable is usually internal to an AS. Typically though, it's not
actually the whole cable, but one or more _wavelengths_ through it - for
example, some cables have up to ~128 different wavelengths (colours) of light
going through them - each 1, 10, 40 or 100Gbps. So a cable operator usually
doesn't actually handle any data transfer but just sell wavelengths to
different providers. Each one usually has a separate laser and then they are
all multiplexed by a piece of optical equipment into a fibre strand. This
method of sending multiple wavelengths is called _dense wavelength division
multiplexing_.

~~~
maxmcd
This is fascinating. Thank you.

------
contingencies
The Chinese mainland will not see significant international speed improvements
until the government decides people should see significant international speed
improvements. Keeping things slow and unreliable, especially in peak times, is
a form of subsidy for local internet-related business and therefore for
government control. Subtle, but hugely effective when push comes to shove:
more so than firewalling.

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sanoli
Following the tip to Stephenson's article, here's also a really good book,
'The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the
Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers'.

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-
Nine...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-
Nineteenth/dp/0802716040)

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jbverschoor
Why only 6 strands? Doesn't it make more sense to put more fiber in there?

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click170
I say this without any knowledge of the profitability of such a venture, and
as someone who does not live in Australia but who is familiar with the running
joke that they have poor Internet:

How about run a new cable, or two, to Australia?

~~~
freehunter
From what I understand, Australia's poor internet service is more due to poor
ISPs and government meddling than the quality or quantity of the backbone.

~~~
joshfraser
The cables are pretty limited in both number and capacity. Just compare
Australia with Japan for example:
[http://www.cablemap.info/](http://www.cablemap.info/)

~~~
rasz_pl
Poor inter continental connections dont explain data caps INSIDE their uber
fiber national network, do they?

~~~
ripdog
No, those are explained by the average consumer not having a clue whether
website X is national or international. Seperate billing has been tried in
some places, AFAIK always abandoned because it confused customers and made
them feel like they were getting screwed over.

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vantagepoint
On a slight offtopic note, I wonder why Japanese websites are still stuck in
the mid 90s to early year 2000 style. One example of this is the imageboard
type of websites, which interestingly enough has caught on here in the US.

I wonder if these better connectivity will bring more cross culture web
designs or applications to both places.

~~~
rasz_pl
Japanese are very egocentric and insular.

There was a story on Hackaday about Japanese Hackers simply ignoring English
speaking part of the internet. Those are Hackers hacking on something in a
Hackerspace, people on the forefront of open minded thinking.

~~~
Torgo
Am I to understand then that there is a parallel online hacking community
populated by Japanese-speakers? I have never really run across this, just
blogs randonly-dispersed.

~~~
nandemo
Of course there is! After all, the majority of Japanese developers don't speak
English.

There's also a lot of offline activity: meetups, study groups and (less
commonly) hackathons.

For example, look at JAWS-UG (Japan AWS User Group)'s schedule:

[http://jaws-ug.jp/](http://jaws-ug.jp/)

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graup
I wonder if this will improve connection to South Korea as well. Browsing .de
websites from here involves a trip around the world, Seoul - San Jose - New
York - London - Frankfurt for an average ping of 300ms.

~~~
ceph_
Increases in bandwidth aren't going to lower latency. This path may be
slightly more direct than an alternate cable system, but as long as your going
through the US, the connection will never be able to go bellow ~200ms between
South Korea and Germany.

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7952
60tbs is such a huge amount of bandwidth. That is the equivalent of 1 million
50mbps wifi connections. Imagine having a single WiFi network with 1 million
people all within 25ms latency of one another.

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BillFranklin
Anyone want to take a guess at Google's motive (other than goodwill)? Better
access to East Asian customers?

~~~
teek
I've been living in Japan and access across the pond is a bit flaky at times.
Most of the time I can blame my local service provider (a sharehouse) for
their piece of shit router, but there are countless numbers of times when a
stream will suddenly cut or a connection will just time out for no good reason
(while other simultaneous connections even across the ocean are fine).

~~~
BillFranklin
Ah, thanks for the background info.

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thathonkey
(USA) Just wanted to point out that "BTW" is most commonly expected to be an
acronym for "by the way" whereas the shorthand for "between" is typically
written "b/w"

edit: title has been fixed! :)

~~~
dang
Ugh. I don't know how we missed that. (Edit: fixed.)

