[HN Gopher] Subsea Cable to Connect Asia, Europe, and North Amer...
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Subsea Cable to Connect Asia, Europe, and North America Through the
Arctic
Author : Sami_Lehtinen
Score : 128 points
Date : 2021-12-24 10:33 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cinia.fi)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cinia.fi)
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| I've never quite been able to understand from a technical
| perspective, but from a Geo political perspective, is why we
| can't cut China off from western Internet? A better diplomatic
| sanction would be to block all Chinese internet traffic.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| First of all, nobody will ever introduce any meaningful
| sanctions against China ever. There are a whole variety of
| practical and political reasons why not. Also, from what i
| understand, China is already extremely busy cutting their
| citizens off from the rest of the internet. (i know this isn't
| exactly what you meant, but still...)
| throwbigdata wrote:
| One decision a lot of people did a few years ago was every
| network link outside of the data center must be encrypted. Not
| sure I'd be comfortable putting something on Chinese fiber
| anyway, but I believe that for them to unencrypt they would need
| tailored operations or significantly better decryption technology
| that I am familiar with.
| jsmith99 wrote:
| Cinia is not based in China. It seems to be owned by the
| Finnish government.
| pchristensen wrote:
| If this Is at all interesting to you, you'll love Neal
| Stephenson'a classic Wired piece Mother Earth, Motherboard -
| https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
| throw0101a wrote:
| See also the Quintillion cable:
|
| > _Phase 2: Extends from Washington State to Japan. Connects
| Alaska to Washington State._
|
| > _Phase 3: Connects Alaska to Canada. Extends through the
| Canadian Arctic to London, with landing stations at Thule AFB and
| Iceland.
|
| * https://www.quintillionglobal.com/system/out-asia-europe/_
| hit8run wrote:
| I wonder how many parties will be going to tap that wire.
| webdoodle wrote:
| Tapping undersea cables is one of the most critical missions
| modern day submarines conduct. So in short: every country that
| can get a sub that far north.
| ec109685 wrote:
| What entities of strategic importance are still sending
| unencrypted data over third party fiber?
| jvmiert wrote:
| For anyone curious, there's an image of the route in this
| article: https://www.aroged.com/2021/12/24/far-north-digital-and-
| cini...
| dustintrex wrote:
| Interesting. I naively expected it to take the shortest/great
| circle route from Europe straight across northern Russia to
| Japan, but no, it actually loops the other way around the pole
| via Iceland and Canada.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| Looks like there would be fewer opportunities to stop and
| connect to existing networks if you went that way.
| BitAstronaut wrote:
| Does scrolling up break that site for anyone else?
| bluenose69 wrote:
| It breaks for me, too.
| edoceo wrote:
| That article has the same ad like a dozen times in a row, and
| also what is clearly JavaScript leaking out around them. Cool
| visual but what a sloppy site.
| mike_d wrote:
| I suspect this site is taking a news feed from VK and
| blending it with content from other sites and rewording
| things to produce search engine spam. This particular article
| it looks like ate some JavaScript for breakfast and threw it
| up all over.
| erezT wrote:
| seems like someone logged some JS right into the DOM there
| ksec wrote:
| Is this Cable specifically for connection to go from EUR to JAP
| without going through China?
|
| I am wondering if this is made possible only because of the
| melting ice cap, where the "possibility" of travelling through
| the arctic is now a low cost issue. I am also assuming once the
| cable are laid, it doesn't make much of a difference whether the
| surface is Artic or Pacific? I am assuming the sea floor is
| roughly all the same.
|
| And why aren't Greenland better connected? The only immediate
| upside I see is the Iceland Connection. Considering they have
| possibly the Greenest Datacenter on the planet. ( I do wonder how
| do they protect against Earthquake ? )
| 3np wrote:
| > Is this Cable specifically for connection to go from EUR to
| JAP without going through China?
|
| ...Is there really any meaningful amount of EU>JP traffic going
| through China? No matter what I try to increase by bandwidth
| between the two (from residential as well as cloud) it always
| gets routed through US. Usually Phoenix. Never been able to get
| north of ~15Mbps IIRC. I'm sure there are providers that can
| provide better through private backbone and premium peering
| agreements, but I haven't figured that out yet. If anyone has
| any tips or strategies on how to approach it would be very
| grateful. Even 50Mbps on a budget would be a game-changer.
|
| My guess would be more about resilience. If a couple of key
| points get knocked out or saturated I imagine things could
| break pretty fast.
| Kye wrote:
| >> _" I am also assuming once the cable are laid, it doesn't
| make much of a difference whether the surface is Artic or
| Pacific? I am assuming the sea floor is roughly all the same."_
|
| The ocean is incredibly difficult to explore under the best
| circumstances. We barely know what's down there in places with
| lots of traffic and a need for regular, slow, imprecise
| mapping. More than nothing is known about the floor there, but
| it's likely less precise and more out of date than places that
| were easier to reach. The Arctic Ocean wasn't even discovered--
| in the Age of Exploration sense, not in the "nobody knew about
| it" sense--until the 1800s. Exploration didn't properly begin
| until the 1950s.
|
| https://www.britannica.com/place/Arctic-Ocean/Topography-of-...
| nnx wrote:
| By how much will it improve latency between EU and Asia? or US
| and Asia?
| xiii1408 wrote:
| Unfortunately probably none, unless you live pretty far north.
| We're pretty close to the speed of light limit* when it comes
| to latency between the US and Asia, which makes sense as a
| straight line is over the Pacific anyway. (e.g., I get ~1.1x
| the theoretical min latency pinging Tokyo from my Fiber
| connection in the SF Bay Area)
|
| Where it seems like we're pretty far from the theoretical min
| is connections within the continental US. Latency is pretty bad
| (e.g. I get like 1.5x - 4x the theoretical min latency from my
| Fiber connection in the SF Bay Area, depending on endpoint). I
| assume part of this is indirect connections (you don't have a
| direct fiber connection between every pair of cities, because
| that would be dumb) and some of it is routing overhead (a
| connection to Asia goes a long distance, but often has way
| fewer hops).
|
| _Note that this is theoretical min latency based on the speed
| of light_ through fiber*, which is a bit higher than (about
| 5/3x) the speed of light through air. New fiber optic tech
| might help this at some point.
| [deleted]
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| In the USA, DOCSIS latency adds a huge chunk for much of the
| residential world.
| zinekeller wrote:
| US to Asia will be literally a backup routing, since that the
| best routes between Japan and western US coast are already
| continuously constructed and maintained. EU and Japan would be
| godsend, the best direct link would be through China, which is
| politically and practically (even with the best of diplomatic
| relations, terrestrial cable linking is much more complicated
| due to mountains, rivers and other obstacles) impossible.
| Although there's an EU-Hong Kong terrestrial link operated by
| RETN, it's a relatively low-bandwidth link compared to the
| aggregate of all Japan-Singapore-Marseille links, so if this a
| high-bandwidth link it'll be a boon.
| bertil wrote:
| It could make Northern parts of America, EU and Asia closer but
| not the Southern parts.
| fulafel wrote:
| It's landing in Alaska, I wonder what the existing submarine
| cables from there to east land.
| virtuallynathan wrote:
| Arctic routes have been proposed for a long time, I hope this
| finally happens.
|
| 2014: https://spectrum.ieee.org/arctic-fibre-project-to-link-
| japan...
| thirdlamp wrote:
| How does that compete with starlink? I suppose the bandwidth of a
| subsea cable is much higher, but latency is worse?
| midasuni wrote:
| Starlink as designed or the current system?
|
| As designed oceanic latencies will be lower than direct fibre,
| only microwave would be faster.
|
| As currently deployed, starlink latency isn't much to write
| home about as you only get a few hindered km to the ground
| station and then you're on fibre.
| PeterisP wrote:
| There's no reason for a subsea cable latency to be worse than
| starlink, both don't go in the straightest line possible but
| close to that.
| mhandley wrote:
| Starlink gets the speed of light in a vaccuum, which is
| roughly 50% faster than the speed of light in glass.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| Fiber gets closer to the speed of light, even when
| accounting for retransmission delays, than just 50%. The
| index of refraction for glass is commonly quoted as 1.5.
| That makes it 33%. Also, Starlink isn't vacuum speeds
| either (unless you are talking about the inter satellite
| laser links and not the downlink to CPE, which even they
| I'm not sure operate at full "speed of light in a vacuum").
| troymc wrote:
| The refractive index of air is _very_ close to that of
| vacuum (which is 1), so most Starlink transmissions
| between nodes (ground-satellite, and satellite-satellite)
| will travel at near light speed.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| > The refractive index of air is very close to that of
| vacuum
|
| Yeah, 1.0003 vs 1.0. Very close, but not the same was my
| point.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The refractive index is only one part of the story, light
| does not follow a straight path through fiber it bounces
| around. I'd assume this to be about the newer inter-
| sattelite links as comparing fiber to fiber plus some
| seems obvious.
| wallacoloo wrote:
| > light does not follow a straight path through fiber it
| bounces around.
|
| this is only relevant for multimode fiber, right? in
| singlemode fiber the light must propagate parallel with
| the fiber. even in multimode fiber, _some_ light is
| parallel, so it doesn't necessarily limit latency -- it
| creates dispersion.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Singlemode is designed to minimized modal dispersion but
| it still occurs, especially over the longer distances
| including from stresses in the core rather than
| traditional bouncing. First photon isn't as important,
| it's the signal peak that matters as the receiver will
| try to decode from that. Typically this latency is hidden
| by needing repeaters every ~60km anyways due to both
| dispersion and loss. I'm not sure how far apart Starlink
| inter-satellite can repeat and if they can "skip"
| satellites as long as there is a clear direct path to
| another farther along the path, I haven't been in contact
| with their engineering folks since I changed jobs last
| year and am no longer a corporate customer.
| dghughes wrote:
| From what I understand Starlink satellites do not
| communicate between each other yet, maybe that's outdated
| info. I know there will be inter-sat comm eventually. But
| they are 500km in altitude and the atmosphere is 100km so
| they only have about 400km of vacuum from obit to Earth
| stations. So it's a 1,000km round trip and then through
| ground stations, fibre cabling.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| > From what I understand Starlink satellites do not
| communicate between each other yet, maybe that's outdated
| info.
|
| It's always been wrong. By design the Starlink satellites
| communicated with each other. Too cost prohibitive and
| infeasible in other ways to have a ground station
| covering every satellite.
| PeterisP wrote:
| While the long term plan was for Starlink satellites to
| communicate with each other, only the last four batches
| of v1.5 satellites have the actual hardware to do so, and
| the vast majority of Starlink satellites in orbit right
| now are only able to talk with ground stations and do not
| have the inter-satellite laser links.
| dghughes wrote:
| Yes but I think the plan is to have any satellite that is
| over a ground station to be the relay for others. Send up
| to a sat then sat to sat via laser and then down to the
| ground.
|
| I'm curious how far each satellite is from the other, do
| they need line-of-sight. And how much it adds to latency
| since signals received and sent have to go through
| networking equipment within each satellite.
| asimpletune wrote:
| I wonder if melting ice is making this easier to do or more
| economically feasible than it has been in the past?
| grecy wrote:
| Yes, Absolutely. A handful of years ago sailing through the
| North West Passage (around Alaska then across above Canada) was
| unheard of. Now it's quite routine, lots of people do it for
| fun every summer.
| tupac_speedrap wrote:
| Probably, Russia are also building the "Polar Express" subsea
| cable from Murmansk to Vladivostok around Siberia so I guess is
| it viable now.
| tiernano wrote:
| I vaguely remember reading that there were shipping routes that
| would be half the time and distance if the ice was melted...
| And some ships run during the summer months... Mostly from
| Russia to Europe... Iirc...
| dragonelite wrote:
| The route will become more popular, it's not a route the US
| can in anyway block. If i'm not mistaken Russia can now ship
| 8~10 months of the year via the artic route, they want/are
| planning to create more nuclear ice breakers i'm sure the
| Chinese are more then willing to make sure the Artic route
| stays open the whole year.
| zerovar wrote:
| Wendover Productions had a video on this
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msjuRoZ0Vu8
| asimpletune wrote:
| Also - totally unrealistic - but what if the ice freezed again,
| making the cables impermeable to spying and ushering in some
| kind of golden era of diplomacy and trust. I remember reading
| that in times when technology favored defense there were
| widespread moments of peace throughout Europe, like in the
| Middle Ages, so this could be something like that.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _but what if the ice freezed again, making the cables
| impermeable to spying and ushering in some kind of golden era
| of diplomacy and trust._
|
| It would make no difference: subsea cables are accessed via
| submarine, which don't care about ice (or no ice).
|
| * https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/t
| h...
|
| * https://www.lawfareblog.com/evaluating-russian-threat-
| unders...
|
| * https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/we-now-have-
| details-u...
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter
| nradov wrote:
| Spying by tapping into unencrypted traffic on undersea cables
| was done briefly during the Cold War. Now governments encrypt
| all their traffic so you won't get anything useful.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells?wprov=sfla.
| ..
| wyck wrote:
| There still a lot of tapping going on, there are modern
| subs build specifically for this.
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(page generated 2021-12-24 23:01 UTC)