The Dunant subsea cable (opens in new tab)

My memory is very hazy - too many beers in North London pubs far too many years ago to remember clearly :-0

And it was probably an E3 (Uk/Europe is E1/E3, US/JP is T1/T3)

In internetworking a Tier 1 carrier is a carrier that is so interconnected other parties pay to receive traffic from them.

The remember seeing one of those in a Uunet data center in north Dallas in the 90s. I was amazed at the tech and also amazed how ordinary it looked.

Please don't give the HFT's ideas, they'll probably do it and cause a half dozen tsunamis in the process.

Heh baby steps maybe? The existing cables aren’t even short paths along great circles. The Oregon-Japan cable google owns is 12000 km along a 7500-km path.

Need to have lava shields for that.

How deep would this bore tunnel be at the centre most point if it was perfectly straight? Would it go into the mantle?

> if you drill it straight enough, you won't even need a cable.

Well, yes and no. I recall they wanted to pursue hollow cables in the early days of optical cabling, but it turned out solid fiber was the answer.

(sorry, can't find a good reference)

So FTTC (Fiber Through The Core) is what you want.

couldn't you start experiments using the Alameda-Weekhauken tunnel?

Alameda enterprises excited by rumours of new chord tunnel Thursday, low latency burrito delivery futures up 5%.

More feasible would be transmitting neutrinos or some other signal that would not be blocked by the Earth.

OP is talking about photonic bandgap fiber I think, or perhaps another kind of photonic-crystal fiber. At any rate, whereas in regular fiber guiding light via differences in refractive index the speed of light is only about 70% c, photonic bandgap fiber can reach something like 99.7% c, which is close enough to c in vacuum as to essentially eliminate the difference vs a free space EM link (particularly for space-based ones which face an extra minimum RTT distance penalty). Last I checked though 3-4 years ago they needed fairly frequent repeaters, were harder to mass produce, etc.

I don't know of any being deployed long distance, though in principle they'd be really valuable for intercontinental backbones. Starlink fills a huge gap in existing infra, and there are places that won't see any sort of fiber, let alone fancy microstructured fiber, for the foreseeable future (or ever, obviously in the case of ships/aircraft). But the bandwidth isn't great. Each current sat does I think 20 Gbps, and though no doubt that'll increase over time that's literally orders of magnitude from this single cable alone. Having the sats support direct ground optical links for backbone usage might be interesting someday, but weather attenuation will never stop being a problem with that. Starlink is filling in the gaps for fiber infrastructure, not replacing it. They're complementary.

So I agree it would be great to see more advanced fiber deployed long distances and start to shrink latency for everyone, and interesting to know what technical obstacles remain if any (maybe a lot remain?). A 40% speed boost while still having massive bandwidth isn't nothing.

Starlink satellites are in orbit 550km high. So any journey would add at least 1100km. Moreover not sure that a single satellite would be able to hit another one across transpacific distances and may need to go through multiple hops to get there.

Each hop will add latency since signal needs regeneration. So it’s not clear to me a swarm of satellites is a real winner from a latency POV. Furthermore, given costs to put the constellation up there, it’s extremely expensive on a $/bit basis and not sure how it could compete against fiber.

The value of Starlink is providing service in areas lacking existing broadband infrastructure where the cost to provide service exceeds the cost of Starlink.

Won't they be at low enough altitude that they'll need more hops than fiber to get around the globe, where each hop adds at least some delay?

Yes. Keyboard, Mousepad, Display, Sound, Graphics.

I mean input lag [1] is easily 50ms. But some of them requires software changes. And any thing software is expensive. The cost of this new Cable is only $300M. Hardware innovation is getting faster and cheaper than Software.

[1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/

Latency reduction like that would mostly be relevant for traders.

Laziness, baroque toolchains, and (most probably): Shipping your org chart.

Ever heard of React, Vue or Angular?

If you meant mandatory in terms of the actual medium requiring it, I can only hint to interactive applications, aside from that I don't think it would actually be mandatory.

I got a blank page when I opened the web site. So as usual I looked at HN comments to see what it was about.

Here's an idea: add some HN logic to automatically move a comment that begins with "TL;DR" to the top of the thread.

> Webdevs: is there a reason why a page would be designed so that JS being on is mandatory?

I think in the case of Google, it's because they've been told they are the best developers, the top 1% of SWE's, they went through rigorous interviews, are paid a small fortune twice as much as they would get at a regular coding job, etc.

So it's dick shaking. They need to show to the world that they're better than plain HTML websites, that they have a massive schlong, that they out-chadded the vast majority of software devs. Plain html? Psht, we can invent our own language, gonna put those six years of uni to work! Wordpress? This is beneath us! It has to be a client-side rendered JS-pulled-through-GWT behemoth because on my system it's... wait it's slower, but nevermind that it's technologically ALPHA.

edit: actually looked at the source, looks like a Polymer / Web Components website. I've had to work in that once, it was dreadful compared to libraries used by real people.

Yeah, it's one thing to build a page that wont render without Javascript, but making the only part that does render be a never-ending spinner is just rude.

This is what I encounter more often than not lately.

Is this due to more and more content simply generated by javascript frameworks?

That would be very kind but I'm quite glad it isn't.

From back when Wired was a really great magazine. I threw out all my 1990s Wired magazines. What a shame.

Pulling such a cable from Atlantic would be hard, expensive, and potentially dangerous to other cables.

And there are likely laws about not obstructing the shoreline.

This was done in the 70s/80s, but I doubt it's worth the effort now. It only worked because the Soviets assumed the cables were inaccessible. End-to-end encryption is a thing even for the general public now.

Now we just compromise the servers/routers. https://gizmodo.com/the-nsa-actually-intercepted-packages-to...

Guessing this would be more typical: https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/.e/interactive/html5-video-media/201...

Because Google owns the sea and no one else can lay cable...

This can join the others - Olympic swimming pool, football fields, London bus, Empire State Building.

That is at least 1 order of magnitude cheaper than I would have guessed. Mind boggling that it's cheaper to do that then buy like the 4th best meal delivery app in Canada or whatever.

That sounds like money well spent, and a good deal considering what it enables. It would be incredible to see the multiple levels of govt around the world collaborate to create a publicly funded (bond sales) project for laying fibre optic across the planet which could not be sold to a private corp, and that guaranteed access to it based on population proportion, not GDP.

The article is now almost a quarter century old and the cables have gotten better. In fact, even that cable probably got a lot faster after optical coherent detection was introduced, i.e. much more capable modems. But the way the cables are actually laid and especially the details of the shore landings and the issues of terrestrial runs, are as current as ever.

Came here to recommend the same. I reread it every 5 years or so for inspiration.

It's not the case here. On their website, google states: ... Dunant is the first long-haul subsea cable to feature a 12 fiber pair space-division multiplexing (SDM) design ...

Multi-mode fibers are not feasible for long distance transmission. For long distance communications, using suggested approach, may be better to use multi-core fibers.

That's interesting! But multimode fiber isn't feasible for thousands of kilometers? This is transatlantic. Wouldn't that have to be singlemode just for the distances involved?

Let's say they do tap the cables (I reckon they do too but in case they don't) what can they actually see if the traffic is encrypted?

Even if this is true, I think the simple reason might be that one of the five eyes country is US, which is probably the global hub for data and services used throughout the world. Also, Britain being near entrance of Europe from Atlantic, and Australia being near Asia would make economical sense for the cables to take that path.

False. Snowden revelations clearly indicated that tapping undersea cables is (unsurprisingly) difficult to detect.

A lot of surveillance is done both *illegally* and secretly.

Forcing carriers to install black boxes next to their routers is not always the preferred choice.

Another recommendation in this vein is Arthur C. Clarke's "How the World Was One", it provides some fascinating historical context for how we got to where we are today (or rather, where we were in 1992).

Agreed, number of books stacked end to end to reach the moon is much more intuitive.

Easy! It's just three olympic sized swimming pools worth of dollar bills stacked to the moon in bits.

I think all of Shakespeare was like 450,000 LOC.

I used to use that metric when folks ask why it took so long to debug. Like, our project is 600,000 LOC and more complicated than any of his works. He didn't have it all memorized and neither do I. It's a metric PMs can understand.

Not travelling through 20 routers in the process tends to help. Again it would be good to get a tangible idea of how much better this is vs just stating the obvious about peak theoretical throughput.

For everything? I was under the impression they still ran all the big stuff on their internal cloud with Borg and all the other infrastructure tooling they built.

Check the second link.

On another note - the third link captures the back button and doesn’t let you get back to hacker news (at least on mobile). What a shitty site.

only on hacker news could you get downvoted for asking legit questions and dumb answers by apologists...

This is what happens when a marketing company starts a cloud right? turns it into a loss leader and everyone who buys it becomes and apologist at all cost.

i don't get it.