FYI, this is NOT the cable Facebook is planning to build, this is the dream cable of a submarine cable… enthusiast? From LinkedIn: “To be clear, this is not Meta's plan or map. This is Ver "T" and T stands for Tagare. It's what I think is going to happen to this cable if I was designing it. This is my wish list.”
AFAICT this post isn't "false" as much as "speculation". Given the news that a cable will be spanning the Atlantic ocean with an end goal of South Asia, South Carolina -> Africa doesn't seem insane. Though it looks like there's no cables there right now...
I was coming in here to complain about "encompass" vs "encircle", but now I'm fascinated by this map. Cool webdev, too!
EDIT: My biggest takeaway is that we should conquer/buy/steal French Polynesia. Also, huge shoutout to the Leif Erikson cable, connecting Oslo with the absolute middle of nowhere[1] in Canada. Oil rig thing, maybe...?
Any time he goes off on some wild tangent in his books, I assume it's because he just recently learned a lot about it and feels compelled to put that info somewhere. I remember Reamde spending a full two pages on the benefits of lashing tires to your fishing craft.
> Any time he goes off on some wild tangent in his books, I assume it's because he just recently learned a lot about it and feels compelled to put that info somewhere.
Stephenson discussed this a bit in the Long Now launch event[0] for "Polostan" and more or less confirmed what you suspect. He also went on to say that he has learned to reel that in and avoid those "rabbit holes". He avoids such digressions in Polostan, in my opinion to the detriment of the book.
I remember reading this and preceding 'In the Kingdom of Mao Bell' https://www.wired.com/1994/02/mao-bell/ and imagining making those articles went down like in 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' book/movie :-)
For this reason, I usually default to reading text-heavy websites on archive.today (https://archive.today/IpfNq [0]). It disables javascript and statically renders even a dynamic page to the extent that it can.
Absolutely unreadable because of this. I often just read segments of a paragraph to see if it contains interesting information and scroll on - or back if I think I missed something - but this scrolljacking breaks everything. I've rarely seen a page as bad as this one.
I was thinking: "They really should add two toggles to the top of the page: one which makes the images static so that the scroll-problem disappears and one where all the non-relevant, non-technical information is hidden."
I think here it is bearable because the page is more like a presentation. The worst is when nothing special happens, and you only notice scrolling is off.
The Digital Antiquarian has a great series of articles on communication, starting with telegraph and finishing on first Web Browser. Reminded me of James Burke Connections.
So do we sometimes lay cables on top of other cables down there?
What governments do you have to go to to get approval to do this? Could I just run a string across the Atlantic Ocean?
If we do lay cables on top of other cables how high do they get stacked? Are there challenges to bring the lower cables back up? Does that happen? Or do we just keep them down there forever basically and upgrade the hardware at the terminal?
> So do we sometimes lay cables on top of other cables down there?
I don't know exactly how often this has occurred but I'd guess it's relatively rare. The companies that operate in this space are very specialized and sophisticated. The locations of pretty much every cable laid in the last half century is very precisely tracked and one of the first things that has to happen when preparing a new cable route is to undertake a high resolution side-scan sonar survey of all or part of the planned route. In shallower water the cables are typically buried under several meters of the seabed.
> What governments do you have to go to to get approval to do this? Could I just run a string across the Atlantic Ocean?
At the very least you'll need to have landing agreements with the countries at the various endpoints. In international waters I believe there are some laws that apply but I gather that it's more about liability. You'd have a lot of difficulty running a string across the Atlantic. Controlling the amount of slack on a cable that's being played out is incredibly finicky work. Keep in mind that the point where your hypothetical string is touching down on the sea bed might be several miles behind where you are and that your ship is going to be bobbing around on the surface and you get an idea.
> If we do lay cables on top of other cables how high do they get stacked? Are there challenges to bring the lower cables back up? Does that happen? Or do we just keep them down there forever basically and upgrade the hardware at the terminal?
Cables are routinely brought up for repair or disposal. The ships that do this are called Agreement ships. In 1866 the second-ever transatlantic cable was grappled up to the surface and repaired (it snapped while laying it the previous year).
Modern cables are fiberoptic and do not increase their bandwidth once laid.
> Modern cables are fiberoptic and do not increase their bandwidth once laid.
That's not true: The amplifiers they use work at the analog (and in fact even optical, i.e. without conversion to electric and back) level, and it's possible to upgrade capacity by only modifying the endpoints, not the entire cable.
Well, the usable capacity of the cable increases, but the cable itself has been doing it's job perfectly all the time :P
I thought that endpoint upgrading of submarine cables was a sort of well known thing (at least amongst people that are aware their data goes and partly becomes a bunch of photons under the ocean, which I guess may be a lot of people here)
> Modern cables are fiberoptic and do not increase their bandwidth once laid.
No kind of expert at all, but I understood that better control over / perception of narrower bandwidths of light have allowed fiber-optic cables to improve their data throughput immensely. Is that incorrect? Or are you using a narrower, technical definition of "bandwidth" that I've not understood?
When I was in school, I interned at a company that specializes in communication systems used to send data over these submarine cables. There is a huge market in terminal stations that send and receive over these cables. The terminal stations that communicate over the lines cost in the 50-100 million dollar range, but the cables themselves can cost upwards of a billion. Being able to maximize the efficiency of existing cables is a necessity.
A large factor for the efficiency, is how “thin” you can make channels in the cable via frequency of the light. Multiple signals can be sent over a single fiber line if they use different frequencies. One system I was working on at the time was constructing 88 channels at 100gbs for a total throughput of 8.8tbs.
Another very interesting aspect, is that service providers might share a lease of the same underwater cable, not actually owning the cable themselves. The companies enter an agreement on the frequency ranges assigned to them. Any mess ups in settings can cause disruption in your neighbor on the cable, resulting in millions of dollars of fines.
1. Pay for best effort traffic level. E.g. A residential user paying for 1gbps service
2. Pay for guaranteed traffic level. E.g. a business paying for guaranteed 10gbps. Often this maps to paying for a dedicated frequency on a cable, but that's hidden from you, you are just provided an Ethernet port or two.
3. Pay for a dedicated frequency on a cable. Also called "lease a wave". As you noted this is the most common way to go undersea. But it's common over terrestrial cables too. In this case the purchaser is often responsible for their own optical networking equipment, and the service provider muxes together all their customers. Sounds like you know more about this than me. The service provider's equipment doesn't have protection if your neighbor is accidentally stepping on your frequency range?
4. Pay for an entire cable. Also called leasing dark fiber. It's 100% your responsibility to "light" it. To make it worth it you're usually using optical networking equipment to mux together several different waves, just like the above scenario undersea, just all different waves belong to you. Commonly used by big tech companies and ISPs to connect their datacenters and points if presences in big cities. Lots of times the company you lease the cable from is also your contractor to repair cuts and maintain the amplifiers every ~50km.
You've got 3 types of use cases merged in one there.
First, The generic business internet which gives you uncontended bandwidth usage as far as an internet exchange point and an ISP which ensures its peering and transit is not oversubscribed.
Second, point to point ethernet connectivity. This morning I had an issue with a point-to-point connection I have from Beijing to the UK for example, where latency had jumped overnight from 215ms to 430ms. This is provided as point to point ethernet by I would assume something like MPLS or VXLAN over the providers network. I've had SDH and ATM backed ethernet services in the past too.
Third, I have link with an optical service from, which does map to a dedicated frequency as in your 3rd option, although it's provided to me as a standard ethernet handoff.
This is different to "pay for a dedicated frequency on a cable", as the service I have has an ethernet handoff. I couldn't put non-ethernet traffic on the frequency.
I've also got dedicated cables with a service provision at an ethernet layer (the provider gives me an ADVA which they control). The actual light goes from the ADVA in my equipment box to another ADVA in another equipment box
In none of these situations do I need to worry about frequencies, high power SFPs, etc, the handoff from the provider is always ethernet, they handle that.
My company does have some leased fibre between campuses too, I tend not to get involved in that, but I know one department runs some 800G sfps over a leased fibre between cities about 200 miles long. I don't think we have any owned fibre other than between buildings on the same campus
I'm no expert either but a complicating factor for undersea fiber-optic cables is that they need amplifiers every N kilometers. So even if the cable itself could theoretically support more bandwidth, the amplifiers might not. The amplifiers contain lasers of their own that fire at very specific wavelengths.
> undersea fiber-optic cables is that they need amplifiers every N kilometers
Huh, I had no idea it needs to be done so frequently.
> These days optical cable repeaters are photon amplifiers that operate at full gain at the bottom of the ocean for an anticipated service life of 25 years.
> Repeaters are a significant cost component of the total cable cost, and there is a compromise between a ‘close’ spacing of repeaters, every 60km or so, or stretching the inter-repeater distance to 100km and making significant savings in the number of repeaters in the system. On balance it is the case that the more you are prepared to spend on the cable system the higher the cable carrying capacity.
Okay, I did a little more digging and it seems you're right eszed! Even undersea cables can increase their bandwidth, at least in some cases; seems to be dependent on some modulation factors that I don't fully understand.
If I'm reading this right, BPSK - used on the longest transpacific cables - can't really be upgraded to have higher bandwidth but QPSK and other modulation schemes used for shorter distances can be (?).
I've read sharks see the cables as potential (ha!) prey due to slight EMF leakage. They chew on them damaging them. Not the fiber optic ones of course.
All trans-oceanic cables carry an electric current in addition to light in fiber(s). Electricity is what powers the optical amplifiers of which there needs to be one every hundred or so kilometers.
For short-ish cables (a couple hundred kilometers), driving the amplifiers via light (interestingly this can be done from both the data-sending and receiving end!) is possible, but not for trans-oceanic distances.
Yeah, the amplifiers need 10,000 volts. The way the cable is constructed is to have the fiber pairs inside a copper tube (there's some other stuff in between too). The voltage is carried by the tube. The ocean itself serves as the ground.
In general the power to the amplifiers is series connected and the ocean does not come into the question at all. If it did you would have huge issues with corrosion even ignoring the effects on the ocean itself. So, along the cable there is a wire that carries small DC current that goes between the amplifiers, each amplifier places zener diode along this wire and gets its power from it. At each landing station there is a current source (that is capable of developing significant open-circuit voltage) that powers this (this scheme is the reason why the cables are laid not only in loops, but in "loops-of-loops").
> The locations of pretty much every cable laid in the last half century is very precisely tracked and one of the first things that has to happen when preparing a new cable route is to undertake a high resolution side-scan sonar survey of all or part of the planned route.
When the cables aren't well buried, they can migrate. No link, but earlier today I saw a description of a repair that was significantly delayed because the cable ends were 15 km away from where they were expected to be.
That said, I think there's a lot of area on the sea, and not a lot of cables, so chances of overlapping are low; especially if a survey is done of the new route immediately before. Although if they're buried, maybe you can't see them so well. And a little overlap here and there probably isn't a big deal, because most of the time cables are brought up, it's because they were severed, so likely it doesn't disturb the other cable too much on its way up.
Overlapping is guaranteed in at least every case where a new cable has a more southern/western terminal on one but a more northern/eastern terminal on the other continent as an existing one.
No idea if specific care is taken to avoid that, or if it's even a problem, but I could imagine so for cables that are buried in the seabed – the act of burying the new one could damage the existing one.
But cables are only buried in shallow waters, is my understanding (where there's high risk of an anchor destroying them), so as long as the point of overlap or intersection is in deep seas, I'd imagine it to not be a problem.
Yeah it's a 2d geometry, of course some of the cables will cross.
The other reason that overlapping would be an issue is if they need to pull up a section to repair it and it's directly under another cable.
But the ocean is really damn big and there are only O(100s) of submarine cables. In both the burying in shallow water case, and the deep water maintenance case, I'm guessing the chances of two cables being in the same place is very very small.
They don't bring the cables up unless a repair is needed. It's probably much safer to leave decommissioned cables on the ocean floor so they don't disturb each other.
hyperscalers are amazing, it's hard to comprehend what's the inflection point financially for them to undergo such a massive investment. Just a matter of time I suppose given all the other things you do at that incredibe scale.
Many of these cable projects are less about saving money on buy vs lease, and more about wanting to have more data transmission capacity between the points on the cable.
Traditionally, undersea cables were owned / maintained by telephone companies or partnerships of several. Over time, that morphed to telecoms companies, including dedicated networking companies. They'd run their own stuff on the cables and lease out excess capacity.
As big tech has been concentrating and also doing more global networking, and running their own backbones and things, they became heavy users of these cables, and then partners, and now sometimes sole owners.
I suspect the actual maritime operations are contracted out.
I don't know how accurate this is, but it seems like a good start towards a list of cables where big tech is involved [1]
> What other private companies have such cables? Google?
Aren't most of them likely to be privately owned?
Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are known to have undersea cables. I bet there are a bunch owned by companies that aren't generally known to regular people. For example, Tata, which AFAIK has the largest amount of undersea cables.
It's becoming apparent that many large tech companies were government-backed entities and their success was fueled by public money. Where else did they get the rights to do this kind of stuff? Surely the public owns these cables as they are built in public waters.
Does the government own your car cause you drive on public roads? It is possible to build on public land if pay the government land rent, the government doesn't own the building and isn't involved in funding.
Also, international waters outside of the boundaries of countries aren't owned by anyone. They probably should be owned by UN to help with problems like overfishing.
I expect the company sees them as private, so that they'll only share capacity with competitors when they want to and for the right price, untilllllll ....
Some other country decides to pull shenanigans and cut / hack the cable, in which case the company will insist the U.S. gov't get involved, maybe pay for the repair. Saying it's crucial for national security.
> What other private companies have such cables? Google
Quite a few, mostly run by telecom companies, often with a few big users/governments in partnership (including Google/Meta/Amazon etc). A Meta supported Atlantic cable was completed last year.
Microsoft/Google/AWS rent out this capacity in the form of networking capacity on their respective clouds. Your bits between their DCs likely doesn't traverse the public Internet (because that costs them more).
I'd say the owner owns it, which these days is usually not a nation.
What's probably more interesting is what law governs them, and it turns out they're regulated under several conventions, including a dedicated one from 1884 and the UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea).
Facebook already stole the “Metaverse” branding from Neal Stephenson and now they are trying to set up a data haven. They should put their hub in a southeast Asia island and name it The Sultanate of Kinakuta.
Wrong Stephenson connection! This isn't a data center, it's a submarine fiberoptics cable – hence clearly a reference to Mother Earth Mother Board [1] :)
I’m sure there are a few Neal Stephenson fans in the ranks of the Meta SysAdmin types! Hopefully there a few computers/systems/whatever named after things out of his books.
Interesting that they say this cable is “potentially for AI” - I really wonder to what end? The ‘Ask Meta AI’ thing they’ve put in Facebook and Instagram seems pretty useless, the comment summaries are potentially kind-of useful but surely actually reduces the engagement (if it makes people less likely to read the comments and therefore less likely to comment themselves, or like or reply to comments).
So that mostly leaves “AI generated nonsense content” for Facebook and Instagram which surely people are going to get sick of fast…?
Just really not actually seeing where they actually get a useful product out of AI here…
> Interesting that they say this cable is “potentially for AI”
Where did you read that? It’s certainly not in TFA. There’s a second article from the same substack linked on the page that speculates it “ may be heavily influenced by AI considerations”, which is not really the same as “potentially for AI”. https://subseacables.blogspot.com/2024/10/facebooks-semi-sec...
Quotes are for direct speech. Never, ever, ever for paraphrasing. The entire point of quotes is to indicate that the thing is not paraphrased, but what was said verbatim.
So it kind of is worth getting hung up about. But hey, today you learned this! :)
Also, AI doesn't seem that network-intensive to me. Chatting with a LLM is nothing, and image and voice processing/generation is not that much either, compute dominates the costs and latency is high no matter where you are. The models themselves are kind of big, so is training data, but you don't need to move them very often.
I would understand better if it was for VR, or simply video/communication.
> The ‘Ask Meta AI’ thing they’ve put in Facebook and Instagram seems pretty useless, the comment summaries are potentially kind-of useful but surely actually reduces the engagement (if it makes people less likely to read the comments and therefore less likely to comment themselves, or like or reply to comments).
Your comment made me think... What if the idea is that Facebook (I refuse to call it meta) is afraid of the very same thing you outlined and therefore thinks that better to be in control of whatever does the cannibalizing with summaries as opposed to letting the OS vendor or potentially web browser vendors control the "AI"?
I don't know the future but maybe it is possible that what we have now with AI slop is something like an uncanny valley and there is something better once we wade through this trash? Even if not, it is probably better for them to throw cash at this and it turns out to be a nothing burger than they miss it and now their whole business is in jeopardy.
The speed of light through a vacuum is about 300,000 km/s. The speed of light over a fiber optic cable is about 200,000 km/s. The distance between, say Singapore and New York, is about 15,000 km. If we pretend the cable runs all the way to the East Coast, this gets us to 0.075 seconds for light to travel that distance around the Earth over fiber.
So that's a theoretical minimum of 75 milliseconds additional lag in addition whatever network equipment exists in between you and your friends. Actually not too bad, even though we concede that the premise is slightly absurd.
If & only if Facebook sell access to capacity on the cable publically (They might just keep it for their internal use), and then if any of the providers that the gaming traffic uses start to use capacity on that cable.
However, fundamentally, even if fibre took the most direct route from your house, directly straight-line to the datacentre with the server in, and then straightline from there to your friends on the East Coast, the time taken to complete that journey and back is still going to be 150-200msec or so; so it won't be as snappy as if you all lived nearby, sadly.
I hope we will never live in a world, where something so important is entrusted to such an untrustworthy company. Things like undersea cables are infrastructure and I would not want that controlled by some for profit company with abysmal reputation like Facebook.
Why those specific things? Why not eg bread or circuses?
The standard economic answer is that governments should at most finance public goods. But nothing of what you mentioned is a public good. (Well lobbing missiles at foreigners perhaps is a public good, but not one that's necessarily worth funding. Just like a light-house in the middle of nowhere might not be worth funding.)
Why does the standard economic answer have any credibility yet?
Standard economics are a simplistic model that fails hard to account for the effects of their own simplifications.
No one sees physicists saying that a bouncy ball will bounce forever because it loses a negligible amount of energy in each bounce, but we see economists talk about a magical system where they get pretty much every assumption wrong and don't account for how it makes the model deviate from reality. (I had a list of aspects where the assumptions go wrong, but it's a bit too long to fit in the margin of this post)
Today economists use things like GDP to understand the economy and you still hear about it and still guides decisions with big impact.
Things like the Gini coefficient is over 100 years old and it showed that the economy could be doing great based on averages, despite it only being true for a few, yet there's still no push away from metrics that misrepresent how most people are doing.
Well, maybe they are also ignored scientists that we all know have ideas on how to improve things, but are powerless too.
Not it doesn't - capitalism has been off the rails for at least a decade or two. Not going to go into a rant here, but just observing the basic fact that capitalism cannot create certain resources we value - such as living space - which comprise a certain percentage (lets say a third) of things we value. This leads to these goods with inflexible supplies inflating in dollar value (see housing crisis).
If housing price increase outpaces wage growth (which it does), with GDP growth being concentrated in very few pockets, this leads to decreasing living standards for most of the population, at least in this aspect.
Capitalism has no problems creating more living space - when it’s not being strangled by building codes which specifically prohibit building more living space.
Yes but the problem isn't just more living space, but more affordable living space.
Sure we have developers in Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, etc plopping down houses >$300-500k, but can the average person afford them? Yes I agree building codes in places like California make houses expensive, but the current market in the United States does not incentivize building affordable housing.
> I agree building codes in places like California make houses expensive, but the current market in the United States does not incentivize building affordable housing
> Uh, new housing has always been more expensive than older housing. That’s normal.
> When more supply goes on the market, existing stock goes lower in price - when there is enough supply.
Yes, that's part of why the housing stock today is nicer than the housing stock 200 years ago: over time the average newly built home was always better than existing houses.
Other than water and veggies, pretty much everything I buy has always been better than what I had 2,5,10 years before, but only housing has been becoming increasingly prohibitive.
You're being a bit reductive lol. Also the parent comment doesn't seem to realize that a subsea cable would enable better connectivity for millions of people.
1. Herd immunity and clean air from that Wikipedia link fall under public goods. Both of those are a subset of healthcare.
2. Basic human needs: many people would argue healthcare, housing, and connectivity should be universally accessible as a moral imperative
3. Broader social benefits. If people have these 3 things, they can be more productive.
4. "bread and circuses" is drawing a false equivalence between basic needs and entertainment/luxury goods. That's just bad argumentation.
> Also the parent comment doesn't seem to realize that a subsea cable would enable better connectivity for millions of people.
That comment specifically listed "connectivity" as something he thought governments should fund, and only complained about governments funding weapons.
I'm all in for connectivity, which is very needed all around the world. It's my 3rd spending only behind really pressing social issues, even before education because I think it boosts it so much that we might not need to spend so many resources on it (right now we devote people's lives to teach and pay them miserably), and communication also helps culture and reaching out to more niche interests groups that if you were to simply hang out in your local town.
Would these poor people buy these goods and services via some sort of network of interconnected computers that talk to each other? Or the stores they buy them from also use this network of connected computers to buy goods and services to stock the store with and run credit card (read EDT) machines? It would have to be some sort of crazy network of interconnected computers.
What should we call such a thing though? This interconnected network of computers. How about the Inter-Conn-Net-of-Computers. Maybe someone could help me shorten that name.
How do poor people on food stamps (EBT) in this crazy made up "store" place pay for (approved) food goods? The card terminal that reads their card connects to their balance via the Internet. without that, they're not able to buy food.
How do goods get to the store for purchase? Does any of that need the Internet? Like when the merchant pays for goods using a credit card?
For better or worse the Internet is critical infrastructure for modern society these days, it's not just scrolling on TikTok.
> How do poor people on food stamps (EBT) in this crazy made up "store" place pay for (approved) food goods?
I suggested to give money to poor people. Not weird stamps and a list of approved goods in some approved store.
But yes, just like you can use money to buy food (a critical component of staying alive), rich or poor alike can also use money to buy internet access.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/map-metas-w-cable-sunil-tagar...
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