[HN Gopher] Facebook (Meta) international cable expansion: anima...
___________________________________________________________________
Facebook (Meta) international cable expansion: animated map
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 132 points
Date : 2022-11-02 21:02 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fairinternetreport.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fairinternetreport.com)
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| I don't see any citation here for the 13% figure or how they
| arrived at this. It superficially seems like they considered any
| cable which FB/Meta were part owner of to be owned by them?
|
| That FB/Meta is buying into cable systems does not surprise me,
| considering how the submarine cable industry is structured and
| the massive scale of FB/Meta. Cables have massive massive capex
| to build and relatively tiny opex. The cost structure is
| completely front-loaded and if you want to be paying the lowest
| cost prices and you have a large enough requirement, the best way
| to do this is to be part-owner on cable systems (or an IRU
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indefeasible_rights_of_use).
|
| Edit a bit because I see this line here: partial ownership over
| 13% of the world's total length of backhaul infrastructure
|
| Basically they are adding up the length of all the cables where
| FB/Meta have any ownership interest (or perhaps just IRUs) and
| dividing by the total number of submarine cable length. This is
| wrong for a number of reasons. These cables are shared in a
| number of ways. Firstly, each cable contains multiple fiber
| pairs, in some of these FB/Meta is using only 1 of 6 pairs.
| Secondly, each fiber is further subdivided by extremely precise
| DWDM technology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-
| division_multiplexi...) which allows multiple signals to travel
| along the same fiber. Finally (and less commonly) fibers are
| divided into segments. This is more common in SE Asia and Africa
| where a single cable is really a system which may land at 10++
| locations, each segment can be a unique route, or sometimes some
| fibers in the system bypass some locations, sometimes some fiber
| pairs completely bypass some landing points. Sometimes just some
| optical channels within a single fiber are diverted to a landing
| point! The total system design is incredibly complicated and
| reducing it to this 13% figure is poor. It is completely
| plausible that on some of these systems that FB/Meta are using
| <1% of the design capacity.
| alphabetting wrote:
| Yeah title framing is a little misleading. They are track to be
| a part owner of 13% of subsea cables. The article is clearly
| focused on Meta but I don't think they're an outlier among big
| tech. Pretty sure Google is the only big tech company to own
| their own private cables and they have a bunch.
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| Amazon has them too, anyone with a huge datacenter footprint
| and massive traffic to shift is going to want to own (part
| of) these systems eventually, it's extremely low risk and
| great reward.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| > low risk
|
| I'll just leave this here.
|
| https://www.politico.eu/article/everything-you-need-to-
| know-...
| alphabetting wrote:
| Amazon definitely has a lot of subsea investment but I
| don't think they fully own cables unless this WSJ piece is
| wrong. https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-amazon-meta-and-
| microsof...
|
| _There is an exception to big tech companies collaborating
| with rivals on the underwater infrastructure of the
| internet. Google, alone among big tech companies, is
| already the sole owner of three different undersea cables,
| and that total is projected by TeleGeography to reach six
| by 2023.
|
| Google has built and is building these solely owned-and-
| operated cables for two reasons, says Vijay Vusirikala, a
| senior director at Google responsible for all of the
| company's submarine and terrestrial fiber infrastructure.
| The first is that the company needs them in order to make
| its own services, such as Google search and YouTube
| streaming, fast and responsive. The second is to gain an
| edge in the battle for customers for its cloud services._
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| Amazon owns 1/6th of CAP-1 (FB/Meta own the other
| 5/6ths).
| bombcar wrote:
| Being a part owner of a subsea cable is effectively buying a
| percentage of bandwidth on said cable. But "Meta is buying
| bandwidth" doesn't sound as scary.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| It really discredits an organization when they put out a
| headline that misleading.
| dang wrote:
| Yes, the submitted title broke the site guidelines, which ask:
| " _Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or
| linkbait; don 't editorialize._"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (Submitted
| title was "Meta will own 13% of global submarine cables by
| 2024". We've reverted it now.)
|
| Submitters: if you want to say what you think is important
| about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to
| the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field
| with everyone else's:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
| virtuallynathan wrote:
| Yea, this is a terrible way of calculating this. I would like
| to see it done based on capacity (which sadly isn't public for
| part-ownership).
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| > which sadly isn't public for part-ownership
|
| It kinda is. Interestingly a lot of these seem to be divided
| up by fiber. E.g. for CAP-1 it's a 6-pair system, FB/Meta own
| 5, Amazon owns 1.
|
| This is from
| https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/trans-
| pacific/c...
|
| I'm not sure what their source is though.
|
| Calculating fiber pairs -> bandwidth is much much harder
| though and is an implementation detail which will absolutely
| change over time. I have no doubt that part of why
| FB/Google/Amazon want to own fiber this way (owning dedicated
| pairs) is so they can experiment with different WDM
| technologies.
|
| Their capacity for failure in the overall system is far
| higher than the traditional companies who are selling
| circuits and must design things for many nines of
| reliability.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| If they go vertical like Amazon they will soon be building the
| ships that put the cables down...
| Bubble_Pop_22 wrote:
| Somebody said Samsung?
| afandian wrote:
| They've already shown they're willing to go vertical with the
| recent announcement about legs.
| Phrenzy wrote:
| Now that is a proclamation you can stand on.
| jedberg wrote:
| If I'm reading this right they aren't really buying the cables,
| they're just buying reserved capacity on existing cables. This
| makes sense. Amazon, Google, and others do the same. It's a good
| way to make sure your data gets across the ocean even when
| everyone else is trying to do the same thing.
| [deleted]
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| Yet every cable listed is co-owned with telecom firms or other
| tech giants. So why is Meta being singled out on this?
| wmf wrote:
| Telcos are "supposed" to own networks since that's their job.
| It's more surprising for Meta.
| fairramone wrote:
| Perhaps Meta will one day pivot to global telecommunications
| provider.
| outside1234 wrote:
| By going bankrupt and fire selling the dark fiber? :)
| virtuallynathan wrote:
| They are already selling "middle-mile" fiber in the US...
|
| https://www.networkworld.com/article/3359239/facebook-gets-i...
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| They already effectively are with WhatsApp.
| ta988 wrote:
| The question is who are they going to sell that to when they go
| under if they continue burning money in their metacrap.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| im sure the NSA would be happy to take em over. this is the
| part where we pretend they haven't already wholesale co-oped
| them
| baby wrote:
| They're printing money you mean
| [deleted]
| virtuallynathan wrote:
| And Google will own... more than that. Google will have 19+
| owned/part-owned cables, Meta has 14.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| The article seems to be counting percentage in terms of total
| kilometers of cables owned. Wouldn't total bandwidth/capacity be
| a better measure?
| [deleted]
| sebastien_bois wrote:
| I heard a meme of how "Meta" is short for "Metastasize" - seems
| like each new FB story makes it more and more of a reality.
| shaburn wrote:
| Is there any kind of natural monopoly here? Who cares?
| uptown wrote:
| There's a war out there, old friend, a world war. And it's not
| about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the
| information: ...what we see and hear, how we work, what we think.
| It's all about the information.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk0Mzci2Sks
| benatkin wrote:
| Indeed that would be very prescient this time last year. Now
| there is a specific war with ammunition though.
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| I literally started in this industry because of that movie (I
| was 8 in 1992) and similar like Hackers / War Games. Amazing
| movie in so many ways.
| aierou wrote:
| Newspaper--
|
| wait, radio--
|
| wait, tv--
|
| wait, social media is going to control the world.
| loxias wrote:
| newspaper: media
|
| radio: media
|
| tv: media
|
| facebook: media
|
| All prior guesses have always been right, but information
| control changes name and shape every few decades. :)
|
| Reminds me of the transformation of the character Media to
| New Media in the TV show American Gods.
| lost_tourist wrote:
| Sneakers (1992) if you don't want to click on links
| VonGuard wrote:
| Uptown Oakland is where the Sneakers' headquarters was located.
| Second floor of the Fox Theater.
| loxias wrote:
| You beat me to it. :D
|
| Simply one of the greatest films of all time.
|
| "Listen, when I was in prison I learned that everything in this
| world, including money, operates not on reality, but the
| perception of reality."
|
| "Stock market? Currency market? Commodities market? Small
| countries?"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09LJJB7dVTU
|
| I know he's the "bad guy" but I suspect I (many of us?) have
| been subconsciously channeling Cosmo since I saw the movie as
| an impressionable kid.
| cube00 wrote:
| Cosmo: I cannot kill my friend.
|
| _[to his henchmen]_ Cosmo: Kill my friend.
| jedberg wrote:
| I wouldn't say Cosmo is the bad guy. The Government is the
| bad guy. Cosmo is just a naive guy who went to prison and
| turned hard.
| jasmer wrote:
| I feel this seems reasonable in an economically liberal context,
| but I would hope there's enough regulatory apparatus to ensure
| they can't do shenanigans as a result of their holdings.
|
| Also, I feel these kinds of things would ideally be managed by
| the state - in the same way that highways are? I mean, data is
| 'the commons' as a public sidewalk. I loathe to think some of our
| governing bodies are not up to the task, but, by gosh, they
| should be.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| I'm no fan of Facebook but this seems like a case of "damned if
| you do, damned if you don't" and/or looking for something to
| complain about. If they didn't fund/build their own cables, these
| same people would be griping that they're using more than their
| fair share of available bandwidth. Facebook has a bunch of bits
| that need to be sent, so they're paying for the infrastructure to
| send them. What's the problem?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-11-02 23:00 UTC)