[HN Gopher] Facebook Building Subsea Cable That Will Encompass t...
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Facebook Building Subsea Cable That Will Encompass the World
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 73 points
Date : 2024-11-04 14:00 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (subseacables.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (subseacables.blogspot.com)
| dpflan wrote:
| What other private companies have such cables? Google?
|
| How do they maintain them?
|
| At what point to these become considered "national security"
| assets (in the eyes of the owning company's nation)?
|
| Do they rent them out as business as well?
|
| (This blog looks like it could have many such answers, but
| looking for a HN-comment-sized answer.)
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > 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.
| samier-trellis wrote:
| Don't some big hedge funds/finance players also have such
| cables?
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| What the hell does Tata need underseas cables for?
| placardloop wrote:
| Tata is one of the largest telecoms in India and is a Tier
| 1 network that forms the backbone of the modern internet.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| Oh...so not the consultancy agency. Got it.
| paxys wrote:
| Same conglomerate, different company
| cryptica wrote:
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Which nation owns a cable under international waters?
| _1 wrote:
| The ones that can hold onto them.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| > 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.
|
| https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
| toast0 wrote:
| 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]
|
| [1] https://blog.telegeography.com/telegeographys-content-
| provid...
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| Lookup Tier 1 ISPs, they usually have them.
| jhalstead wrote:
| You can see some of the cables in
| https://cloud.google.com/about/locations#network
| DANmode wrote:
| > At what point to these become considered "national security"
| assets
|
| Decades ago.
| godber wrote:
| There's an even more recent post
|
| https://subseacables.blogspot.com/2024/10/facebooks-semi-sec...
| cjaackie wrote:
| 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| 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.
| mschild wrote:
| Highly recommend an article by The Verge on how these things are
| repaired and maintained.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea...
| pier25 wrote:
| great article but man I hate all that scrolljacking
|
| who ever thought this was a good idea?
| svdr wrote:
| 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.
| nickparker wrote:
| Also the GOAT of cable laying articles: Neal Stephenson doing
| gonzo journalism on the topic in the 90s
|
| https://euripides.dk/setebos/frx/matrix/ai/books/stephenson_...
| prettyStandard wrote:
| 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?
| wmf wrote:
| 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.
| staplung wrote:
| > 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.
| toast0 wrote:
| > 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.
| eszed wrote:
| > 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?
| clown_strike wrote:
| > What governments do you have to go to to get approval to do
| this?
|
| It's a good question, the ocean being international waters and
| all.
|
| I dont know that answer but for [geosynchronous] satellites in
| orbit this is negotiated with affected countries via the ITU.
|
| (Create a mesh of undersea cables dense enough and you end up
| with a tripwire for submarines...)
| Angostura wrote:
| It's possible that the ITU might still be involved.
| https://www.itu.int/
| h1fra wrote:
| I can't even imagine the price of the cable that will go from
| Australia to the east coast, that must be astronomical
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