Undersea cables started out as ventures by investors to make money. They made money, and the people who used them made money, and you get to communicate globally because of them. It's cheaper to communicate with someone halfway around the world on the internet than to mail them a letter, thanks to profiteers.
You have all kinds of nice things because profiteers created them to make money. Including the computer you used to type in your message.
As for social justice, free markets have done far more for social justice than any other system. For example, it isn't a coincidence that the success of free markets occurred at the same time as when slavery collapsed worldwide.
Having seen people work on similar problems first hand, I doubt there is any dishonesty involved. There are two groups of people involved here: investors and builders. The investors are the ones out to make money, but many of the rank and file doers that are actually doing the building genuinely believe in the good they are doing in the world. I seen't it... many times.
Heck, I've worked on such projects where I'm genuinely proud of the positive change I made in the world. Was I paid for it? Yes. Was I motivated by money? Yes. Was I also motivated by doing something good and meaningful? Yes. Being motivated by making money and doing good in the World are not mutually exclusive.
Those who wrote this blog post are very likely those whose involvement is at least partially motivated by doing good in the world.
This is what the parent is referring to. There is nothing bad in doing business, but I agree that it is sickening to sell it as a humanitarian endeavor.
Facebook is cynical, devaluates the work of real humanitarian organizations and misleads the public on the collateral consequences of their actions.
Market economies are good, I agree. Monopolistic companies like Facebook put the markets and the economy at risk.
This cable will carry a lot of Internet traffic and that's going to have complicated effects. On the whole, more Internet access does benefit people, though.
Ultimately what matters is how much good you do in the world by improving the lives of those who have it worse. That's all that matters to those that have it worse and that's the only metric that matters here.
If you have to choose between, working for a humanitarian organization and helping out N people and working for a for profit enterprise and helping out 2N people, all other things being equal, you should choose the latter every since time because that makes all the difference for the additional N people helped out. The N people that don't get helped out because someone went to work for a real humanitarian organization get no benefit from the purity of motivation.
Anyone who chooses otherwise isn't actually motivated by helping people. They are motivated by their ego and feeding what they think is the ideologically pure thing to do.
There are few things sadder that I've witnessed than a talented person with the capacity to make the world a better place, fritter away their talent in endeavors that don't allow them to maximize the good they can do.
Slavery ended around the world during the age of protectionism, not free markets.
For example, abraham lincoln who freed the slaves also declared : "Give us a protective tariff, and we shall have the greatest nation on earth"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism_in_the_United_St...
The US was a protectionist anti-free trade nation until the 1950s.
You are forgetting that race based slavery began under capitalism, the genocide of native americans happened during capitalism, etc. You can't falsely cherrypick one data point and ignore all the others that refute your claim.
Most of Saudi Arabia/Qatar/UAE is built on "bonded labour" which is slave labour but with a better name.
Didn’t slaves build the pyramids? Was there capitalism then?
Have you read Sapiens by Harari? It touches on the fact that the Neanderthals and other species of humans died out ... perhaps due to genocide perpetrated by Homo sapiens, prior to the advent of capitalism by any measure.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapiens:_A_Brief_History_of_...
> race based slavery began under capitalism,
Nope. Slavery had gone on for millennia. How about the ancient Egyptians enslaving the Hebrews? How about Columbus enslaving the Indians?
(The native americans practiced slavery, too.)
Slavery died out in the northern colonies before 1800 because it was unprofitable, i.e. free markets killed it. It was dying in the south, too, until Eli Whitney revived it with his cotton gin. But that was just a temporary reprieve, it was dying again by the 1850s, and the South tried to save it by seceding.
Free markets killed slavery, because slavery simply cannot compete with them.
> the genocide of native americans happened during capitalism
As for genocide, that has happened since the Cro-Magnon killed off the Neandertals. The entire history of humanity is one of violently pushing other people off their lands. Until very recently, when societies have been getting more peaceful, along with the rise of free markets. (For example, after defeating Italy, Japan and Germany in WW2, the US (and Britain and France) gave those countries back to their citizens. How often has that happened?)
I'd bet there's also a bit of geopolitical planning going on here as well. It will be far easier to cut african nations off from the internet if we control their access points.
As with every gift from the West, the africans probably want to be a little careful about this one. Maybe make sure they maintain a few different links that are, if not controlled by the africans themselves, at least can be controlled by Brazilians, or Russians, or Chinese.
It's not even just the same. The end result is way better than what a purely ideologically motivated organization would have been likely to achieve, if anything.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/the_end_justifies_the_means
Is there another model that has had similar success?
In this case FB benefits, and Africa benefits. There is no conflict to sweep under any carpet.
Nobody with any sense is going to ding you for that.
Or, to make it more concrete: I got some really tasty bread from a bakery this morning. I'm happy that the bakery made a profit from that, because otherwise they would have shut down years ago and then I wouldn't have been able to get fresh fancy focaccia. I wasn't exploited; I was fed.
https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ "Mother Earth Mother Board"
This is a good hour-long read, one of the most interesting descriptions I ever read of all that goes into funding, building, operating subsea fiber optic cables that connect us around the world. It's a couple years out of date, but very entertaining. Goes from the physics of transmission all the way to the ships and people who lay the cable.
This is a timeless classic from Wired, written by Neal Stephenson in 1996. I love this article not only because of the article itself, but its enthusiasm and energy from the age it was written in. It was an age with a bright future where everything seems possible. Back at that time, Wired represented the avant-garde of Silicon Valley (including the fact that Neal Stephenson being the author) that was going to revolutionize everything through computing and the Internet, the free and fast flow of information enables decentralization, and would liberate us from all the old forms of political control.
In particular, this article had a clear techno-libertarian overtone, about how authoritarianism and monopoly would be defeated through disruptive innovation. One goal of constructing FLAG (the cable) was explicitly to reduce the reliance of the infrastructure of the United States and to challenge the role played by traditional ISP over the control. The article even mentioned the early cypherpunk movement (in the mid of the first Crypto War), and acknowledged "Virtually all communications between countries take place through a very small number of bottlenecks, and the available bandwidth simply isn't that great. Even outfits like FLAG don't really grok the Internet." But FLAG was still seen as a step moving towards the correct direction and the beginning of the new network order.
The dream eventually came to an end. Wired-inspired DotCom bubble busted. Although FLAG was the first move to break U.S. and traditional ISP's monopoly, future projects in the next 10 years didn't quite accomplish this goal. Silicon Valley became the new giant establishment and monopoly (the critics say massive deregulation was partially responsible). Authoritarian regimes have done a good job preventing the information flowing online to bring liberal political changes. And the Internet has been seized as the means of mass surveillance.
Nevertheless, the late 90s was a great age to be alive with that dream.
>the free and fast flow of information enables decentralization
i was a believer. big time. starting in 99, was helping democratize telecom via VoIP. ate up long tail theory like candy.
but now i think we were incorrect in thinking the problem was only on the supply side - the monopolies (of that day) control of the supply side. that was a problem, but there are two sides of the hose.
the other side of the hose is us. 24 hours in a day. 1440 minutes. minutes increasingly bombarded as the supply side of the hose has widened, and the hose now lives in our pockets instead of on a piece of furniture.
i still believe decentralization will occur - simply because things do usually balance over time (or at least the pendulum moves back and forth) - but won't it take more than 'fixing' the supply side?
Of course, it turned out precisely the opposite.
The thinking wasn't wrong at all. It merely failed to extrapolate to what happened to the American wild west after the era of the gold rush. The vast, vast majority of humanity doesn't want to live in the wild west. And when given the option between a laissez-faire no rules world where those with better understanding of the natural rules triumph and a structured society, structure wins every time.
Nobody is really forced to use Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Google. Or Amazon. But they are, all of them, vastly more convenient than the DIY alternatives which were the only option when the internet was young.
>Nevertheless, the late 90s was a great age to be alive with that dream.
Music, Art, Tech, everything seems to be better in the 80-90s. An era, just like the article shown and described where people put heart and soul into it.
I have been thinking a lot about this, still not entirely sure why. And this isn't nostalgia, I have seen many not born in the era thinking they missed the "golden age".
Live is definitely better in post 00s, but something is different. Something is missing.
Many people say the golden age was the 60s. Or the 20s. Or the 70s. Or the 00s. Or the 50s.
Probably not the 30s and 40s.
There was certainly a change in the 90s, the fall of the Berlin Wall, but pre-9/11, was a major change in western culture, and that feeling of American superiority having "won" the cold war
In the UK, after 97, it was "cool Britannia": a forward thinking positive inclusive nationalism. The strife and scandal of conservative government was over. There was even a peace agreement with the IRA that brought an end to 40 years of bombs and troops in the street.
In many ways, we've reached the "plateau of productivity" for many of the promises of the 80s and 90s and I suspect that's why this sentiment persists. The reality of now is not as good as the promise of the 80s-90s but it's definitely better than the reality of the 80s and 90s.
I remember talking to people in the 80s and 90s and them talking with reverence about bands like Nitzer Ebb, Front 242, Jesus and Mary Chain etc. and me just "not getting it". I realize why, I just didn't like them very much. In theory I liked this type of music, but the bands were all not very polished and there was just something missing.
Cut to years, small bands that would have been forgotten or fizzled out before they could release anything all have an internet presence and do this type of sound better than the bands they're emulating: Schwefelgelb [1], Second Still [2], Linea Aspera [3], Boy Harsher [4] etc.
Want 80s synthesizer music that's orders of magnitude better than the 80s? Try Com Truise [5], Airglow [6], or a host of onther "synthwave" musicians [7].
And in terms of tech, there's just absolutely no comparison. We can literally buy full fledged GHz linux boxes for under $20 that run at 1.25W [10]. For the intrepid, they can create radio from software with a USB dongle that costs under $50. Want to make a custom computer? Have it assembled in China and shipped for a minuscule cost of what it would have been 2-3 decades ago.
One of the things I think you're forgetting about the 80s and 90s was just how stark it was. You should check out shows like "Halt and Catch Fire" [8] and "Mixed-ish" [9]. They both highlight portions of that time period that were awesome but they also show just how shitty portions of that time period were. You're forgetting the stack of floppies, the game booklets with beautiful art only to find games that looked like pixelated blobs, the waiting for the ISP line to stop being busy, the shitty television with 10 minutes of ads for every 20 minutes of content.
A telling example is the magazine 2600. When I was growing up, 2600 was a coveted magazine that was full of promise about the secrets of the burgeoning tech world. It was quintessentially cyberpunk and it was great. Cut to now, 2600 is still in circulation but only up until very recently [11] refused to have an online presence, only putting out a paper magazine and being sold in chains like Barnes and Nobles. They became increasingly irrelevant with the access to knowledge on the internet and then doubly so by refusing to graduate from their 80s aesthetic.
I recently had someone show me their zine that was either printed or "authentically" xeroxed and painstakingly stapled together. This is cargo cult punk rock and indulges in all the empty aesthetics of counter culture without understanding the reason they existed in the first place. Xerox zines rose in prominence because they were a "printing press" that was an order of magnitude cheaper than any alternative. People wanted to disseminate knowledge and photo-copiers were the most expedient way to do that.
Today we have blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Digital Ocean, etc. but they've become so commonplace that the older generation looks back on a "simpler time", when kids could put on a show by "word of mouth". There was a show I just saw that said "the internet is how you advertise by word of mouth now".
I think there will always be people in a generation that will be nostalgiac for the previous decade they weren't part of. The only thing i can say is that there will always be an older generation talking about their glory days of when they scored the winning touchdown in high school and a portion of the younger generation that gets caught up in that narrative.
I feel like I'm living in an age of wonder.
[1] https://schwefelgelb.bandcamp.com/album/dahinter-das-gesicht
[2] https://secondstill.bandcamp.com/
[3] https://lineaaspera.bandcamp.com/
[4] https://boyharsher.bandcamp.com/album/lesser-man-ep
[5] https://comtruise.bandcamp.com/album/in-decay
[6] https://airglow-strat.bandcamp.com/album/airglow-memory-bank
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Synthwave_musicians
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series...
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-ish
Cute cats, per se, is not the problem. Did you know the "Cute cat theory of digital activism" [0]? Literally, the first online cat meme posters imagined the freedom and productivity that cats would offer to digital liberty.
> trying to prevent people from yelling at each other based on fake news
This turns out to be a much bigger problem that couldn't be solved using cat memes.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cute_cat_theory_of_digital_act...
1996...
But I will definitely be adding it to my reading list!
> go live in 2023/4
> design capacity of up to 180Tbps on key parts of the system
> 16 fibre pairs
> Cable burial depth has also been increased by 50%
Patners: * China Mobile * Facebook * Orange * STC * telecomegypt * Vodafone * WIOCC
Africa has 253x the population of NZ.
The amplification is obviously there for losses in the cable, but you also need to do clock recovery and thresholding because the light pulse gets spread out as it travels.
Higher data rate => More analog bandwidth (distribution of frequencies from the laser)
More analog bandwidth => Worse chromatic dispersion
You need to either:
* Increase the frequency of the laser (so BW/center frequency is smaller, hopefully reducing dispersion), which might not be possible with current tech or be very expensive
* Decrease the dispersion of the fiber (more expensive or lossy fiber)
* Have periodic signal conditioners
Due to the advent of coherent optical transmission and DSP, dispersion is no longer an issue for long distance optical communication. The limitation becomes nonlinear “crosstalk” between wavelengths and lower dispersion makes the nonlinear crosstalk worse as the phase matching condition for nonlinear processes can be reached more easily. To avoid this most new subsea cables use a high dispersion design as this helps mitigate nonlinear effects.
Additionally coherent systems have a higher spectral efficiency and are transmitting >2bits/symbol because the information is encoded in the electric field’s phase and not just intensity. Depending on the reach, the number of bits per symbol can be increased. The advent of probabilistic shaping, allows more bits per symbol to be transmitted in higher order constellations. Probabilistic shaping produces a more ‘random-like’ coding that gets us closer to the Shannon Limit and also reduces the optical intensity rms further reducing nonlinear penalties. In fact in optical communications there is something called the nonlinear Shannon limit that takes into account the additional “noise” produced by nonlinearities in the fiber. See:
https://www.popsci.com/google-fastest-internet-cable-atlanti...
Also keep in a mind that fiber itself is theoretically unlimited bandwidth wise. So as the transmission gear on each end that lights the fiber improves so does the available bandwidth each fiber pair can't provide. The other issue is that the cable plant itself has a limited life as well generally around 20 years although that number has gone up recently to 25 or so years. So anything that's fiber not lit for the majority of that 25 year life span is potentially money wasted.
You need one cable for each fiber, they aren't all in one bundle like fiber might come into your office.
Assuming FB wins over either Chinese social networks or African-developed and operated ones of course.
FB is planning 10-15 years ahead because Africa is the next part of the world that will develop a middle class.
Corporations like Google and Facebook leasing wavelengths are doing E2E encryption in their own upstream gear, but your random ISP hauling cat videos isn't.
Random ISP may not be running MACSec, but a significant portion of subsea cable traffic does run over MACSec as it goes between datacenters and from datacenters to POPs where those cat videos get handed off to ISPs in the same region.
There's also in part a trust issue. So many suppliers are unreliable, the biggest firms end up doing a ton in house.
Yea, that's 3.5 billion people whose lives haven't been datamined yet by these scumbags.
China building ports and rail (with predatory, sovereignty-usurping lending terms); Facebook building fiber (with ROI measured not in bandwith-revenue, but captive audience eyeballs). Military bases vs data centers. Power projected as global military presence vs global advertising market. The usefulness to each "colonizer" is nothing to do with benevolent investment at a modest interest rate, but exploitative access, while slinging PR about providing basic needs to humanity.
Maybe I'm being overly cynical. I generally would be inclined to view this type of deal as win-win, everyone benefits.
On the other hand, between Facebook and China, I honestly don't know who I would trust less with my data. Or who to be more suspicious of, being subject to their algorithms, social engineering, propaganda, agenda, global ambition, etc.
Of course I say this having multiple vectors of internet access and the benefit of not being subject to Chinese sovereignty.
https://manypossibilities.net/african-undersea-cables/
It seems like getting terrestrial fiber into the interior of the continent would be much more impactful. For instance SEACOM was completed in 2008 with landing stations in Tanzania and Kenya but it took 2 years to lay the terrestrial cable to get places like Rwanda and Uganda connected to it:
https://www.reuters.com/article/ozabs-rwanda-telecoms-idAFJO...
Yes there is always a concern about commercial profiteering getting in the way of the quality of this, but that's to be said for every form of making profit. We can solve that problem on a systemic level, for now let's take what we can get.
What are those dots in front of the coast of Sierra Leone and Liberia? Why are there two dots at Senegal?
What islands in the Atlantic will be connected? It looks as if the Capverdes are left out but the Canaries might have a connection to this cable (but there is no white dot there). I wonder if St. Helena will get lucky. Details please!
I am wondering on the break down of the cost and which part is the most expensive. Because if "layering" cable is expensive wouldn't be make more sense to layer more cable in on go? 180Tbps doesn't seems a lot for a continent as big as Africa.
