[HN Gopher] Google's Subsea Fiber Optics
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Google's Subsea Fiber Optics
Author : shade23
Score : 115 points
Date : 2022-05-18 17:42 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cloud.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cloud.google.com)
| gnfargbl wrote:
| I make 340Tbit/sec about 1.1x10^11 GiByte/month. GCP premium tier
| networking is priced at $0.08/GB, so at 80% load that cable
| would, _very_ naively, have the potential to bring in $7B /month
| in revenue.
|
| I'm sure they only take in a fraction of that, and their costs
| are substantial. But even so... cloud bandwidth is overpriced.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| 8c is for transit to outside of their network. For inter-region
| it's like 1-15c depending on regions. 1-2c for us/europe which
| is probably overwhelming majority
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Also 80% utilization seems just ridiculously high to me but
| maybe at goog volume it's doable
| klysm wrote:
| I remember seeing a cloudflare post about AWS bandwidth
| pricing where they estimated something like 20% utilization?
| I don't remember where though but I think they can
| approximate pretty well.
| throw0101a wrote:
| Well, you wouldn't want to hit 80% on Day 1, as you would
| have no room for growth. Perhaps 50% and after a few years+
| you'll hit 80% and start planning for a new cable.
|
| + The video said this started five years ago, so there
| appears to be a lot of lead time that is needed.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Google regularly runs these at 100%. According to the B4
| paper:
|
| """These features allow many B4 links to run at near 100%
| utilization and all links to average 70% utilization over
| long time periods, corresponding to 2-3x efficiency
| improvements relative to standard practice"""
| klysm wrote:
| Yup, but it will continue to be absurdly overpriced because the
| CapEx is massive and governments are totally okay with
| oligopoly.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| You're thinking about average throughput, while these cables
| need to be provisioned for max throughput, which can be
| completely different.
|
| Having said that, cloud bandwidth is indeed overpriced; but at
| the same time, given that Google Cloud is still burning money,
| can it perhaps be argued that bandwidth is one of the money
| makers that allow for other services to be free?
|
| I recall that from the old webhosting days, this was already a
| common tactic of the providers: lure people in with cheap
| servers, sometimes even at a loss, and earn money back with
| bandwidth.
| closedloop129 wrote:
| Is it good for the economy though?
|
| Resources are used depending on prices. If the costs for
| providing bandwidth are low and everything else is expensive,
| but the prices are the other way round, then the economy
| optimizes to waste resources. That's not sustainable.
| samtho wrote:
| With the exception of high-storage/bandwidth websites like
| video hosting platforms, bandwidth scales linear relative to
| audience/reach so the high cost is a justifiable expense. We
| haven't seen a race to the bottom with bandwidth like we have
| with storage because the usage of bandwidth implies the product
| is being used.
|
| Furthermore, software (as a product/service) has the lowest
| marginal cost of nearly any product. Given the cost it takes to
| have one more customer on your platform is some nominally small
| amount of bandwidth (which depending on the product, can be sub
| 1 gigabyte per month) the additional expense is easily
| justified.
| [deleted]
| throw0101a wrote:
| Richard Steenbergen has regularly given the presentation
| "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Optical" at NANOG
| over the years; October 2019:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKeZaNwPKPo
|
| APNIC/NZNOG had a good presentation focusing on sub-sea optical
| stuff (January 2020)):
|
| * https://blog.apnic.net/2020/02/12/at-the-bottom-of-the-sea-a...
|
| For longer distances (>100km), you want to do a search for
| "coherent optics".
| cycomanic wrote:
| For those more interested in this topic TE Subcom (now just
| Subcom) has some cool videos about the process of deploying and
| repairing these submarine cables. Just search for te subcom on
| YouTube.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Are we gonna get the Google Moon Cable anytime soon? :-D
| exdsq wrote:
| Is that a real idea? Can't Google right now unfortunately!
| Melatonic wrote:
| Not that I know of but I thought it might be funny!
| aborsy wrote:
| The internet includes many components:
| semiconductors/electronics/chips, hardware, fiber optics,
| communication systems, networking, wireless, software, etc. There
| is a lot of work that must be done in different parts of this
| stack for this system to work.
|
| Yet, the private sector focuses mostly on the software part, or
| services. I have rarely seen a start up on improving optical
| fiber or electronic chips. The public sector builds the
| infrastructure, often following decades of investment and work.
| People working on infrastructure either work for the government
| for pennies or, if they haven't yet lost their jobs to
| outsourcing to developing countries, have difficulty finding
| employment. The profit goes to consumer companies focused on
| software or services; worse, these companies claim credit for the
| whole Internet.
|
| Obviously CapEx will be large for a company with a product on
| infrastructure; there are monopolies; customers will be large
| operators, etc. Still, are there resources to better understand
| this issue? It always seemed to me a scam.
|
| Also, will the situation change for "hardware"startups/companies?
| catmanjan wrote:
| Tragedy of the commons, its the same reason there are big car
| companies but not big road companies.
| yewenjie wrote:
| I don't understand why or how the people in the video are so
| glowingly happy/smiling. Is some point being made there?
| sgarman wrote:
| Also crazy camera angles showing the backs / sides of people
| talking.
| decebalus1 wrote:
| > Is some point being made there?
|
| Yes! That everything is fine, everyone is happy and if you're
| not happy, then the only sane conclusion is that there's
| something wrong with you.
| [deleted]
| chrisseaton wrote:
| People happy to share their work. Is that some kind of problem?
| hericium wrote:
| Feeling comfortable at work usually doesn't involve grinning
| into an abyss like at one's best friend.
|
| This looks forced and cringey.
| [deleted]
| upwardbound wrote:
| The video doesn't look like that, it looks more like everyone
| was told "you have to smile more!!"
| openknot wrote:
| I was going to write that this was demonstrably untrue, but
| then I saw the muted-microphone shot of an interviewee
| laughing without context before cutting to a straight-faced
| interview segment that appeared more natural (at time = 80
| s), which was quite possibly recorded after the straight-
| faced segment to make the video's happy tone consistent:
| https://youtu.be/N0ng8R0_Tis?t=80
| chrisseaton wrote:
| This seems a super-cynical take. Some people are smiley and
| happy naturally. You might pick them to be in a video.
| [deleted]
| imilk wrote:
| Have you never seen a video produced for or by a company
| before?
| wjamesg wrote:
| It's an overproduced PR piece
| danellis wrote:
| What would be the correct amount of production?
| throw0101a wrote:
| A presentation at a conference like NANOG, APNIC, IETF,
| etc. See my other comment:
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31426614
| kuprel wrote:
| candid unrehearsed interviews
| imilk wrote:
| Good luck getting anyone at a publicly listed company to
| sign off on a video promoting a $xxx million project with
| candid unrehearsed interviews.
| vfclists wrote:
| When they say a single cable can deliver 340 Tbps capacity, do
| they mean a single fiber strand, or a bundle of strands in a
| sheath that we know as "cables"?
| cycomanic wrote:
| Generally the throughput for a single mode fibre in the C + L
| Bands (the wavelength regions used for telecom applications),
| is about 100 Tbit/s for a one span link (50-100km) for a
| submarine cable across transatlantic distances IIRC the record
| is around 50-70 Tbit/s. This is research demonstrations, so the
| 340 Tbit/s would be for a cable with plenty redundancy. Also
| note that fibres are used in one direction only (one of the
| main reasons is that one would otherwise create a very long
| laser), so for duplex operation you need to double the amount
| of fibres.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| It seems like the expense would be in the armored outer
| cable, repeaters, and labor for laying the cable but perhaps
| at those distances the glass cost matters? Still it seems
| like you'd want to cram as many fibers into the cable as
| possible. There must be some limiting factor that prevents
| you from putting 1000 strands or 10,000 strands in a single
| cable.
| wil421 wrote:
| Pretty sure they mean the sheath that contains the bundles of
| fiber cables.
| ortusdux wrote:
| I wonder how long it will be before we see the first hollow-core
| fiber subsea cables. They are 50% faster, and tests from the last
| year or two have seen record low signal losses.
|
| https://www.laserfocusworld.com/fiber-optics/article/1419605...
|
| https://www.ofsoptics.com/wp-content/uploads/Hollow-Core-Fib...
| controversial97 wrote:
| I might be totally wrong; It seems likely to me that, due to
| capillary action, if a hollow undersea fiber gets physically
| cut then seawater would flow into the hollow center.
|
| The ends of the fiber might be at different depths with a
| pressure difference that could move water a long way into the
| fiber. I imagine the length that water got into would be ruined
| even if the water was pushed out again.
|
| I conjecture that undersea hollow-core might end up being
| expensive to maintain.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| If there's a leak that would allow water access to the core,
| the signal's already gone.
|
| And, a hole that small in a block of glass could withstand a
| titanic amount of pressure.
| [deleted]
| esoterae wrote:
| IIRC individual fibers are terminated every Nkm at a
| repeater. Not that it wouldn't be spendy, but I would also
| conjecture replacing a segment of fixed length instead of
| just gluing the ends back together might still be a
| reasonably strong constraint on unplanned repair cost (and
| also probably providing a pretty strong lower constraint as
| well--notably higher than solid core).
| geph2021 wrote:
| With hallow-core, Spread Networks[1] could be back on top
| again!
|
| 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_Networks
| happyopossum wrote:
| > They are 50% faster
|
| No, pretty sure light still travels through them at C. What
| they can do is carry more data, largely by having lower error
| rates.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| It's so nice when someone other than myself is confidently
| incorrect.
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| 'c' is dependent on the medium. The value of c as it is
| commonly known, 300 million meters per second, is in vacuum.
| Light traveling through other media is affected by its index
| of refraction, in the case of silica fiber, that is
| approximately 1.5 so radiation propagates much slower through
| silica than it does a vacuum. Since gases have low refractive
| indicies already, within a hundred ppm or so of a vacuum, you
| could essentially round air to 1.
| ortusdux wrote:
| I've heard that high frequency traders are interested in
| Starlink's planned laser links because they could open up
| routes that are faster than traditional terrestrial fiber.
| guipsp wrote:
| I think that if you are a HFT, you probably have a server
| set up next door.
| samwillis wrote:
| The suggestion is about trading across multiple
| exchanges, for example between London and NY. Going via
| Starlink is potentially quicker than a fiber under the
| Atlantic.
|
| They will have servers "next door" to the exchanges, but
| need the servers to have incredible low latency
| connections to each other.
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| Yeah, that would make sense. There are links that have
| been built by various HFT firms and banks [0] [1] that
| use microwaves instead of fiber buried in the ground
| simply because of this speed-of-light-in-media
| limitation. They can shave a few hundred nanoseconds (or
| something, I don't want to do the math right now) because
| of a higher signal propagation speed and get a trade in
| faster than their competitors. Same thing with a laser
| link like this.
|
| Edit: cf.
|
| [0] https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2016/11/priva... [1]
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-highfrequency-
| microwave/l...
| cycomanic wrote:
| I know the main people behind much of the hollow core
| work being done. Much of their financing is coming from
| HFT related firms.
| maxfan8 wrote:
| Light only travels at C in a vacuum (so it doesn't actually
| travel at C in a standard fiber optic cable, it's actually
| much slower).
| scottlamb wrote:
| "c" is the speed of light _in a vacuum_. Traditional fiber
| optic cables are very much not a vacuum, with an index of
| refraction of ~1.5, so light travels through them at ~2 /3c.
| In contrast, light actually travels at nearly c through
| hollow core cables.
| [deleted]
| elteto wrote:
| Unrelated, but if interested in ocean cables check out "A Thread
| Across the Ocean" by Steele. It's the story of the first
| transatlantic cable. It's a riveting read that is hard to put
| down. Full of interesting technical details intertwined with the
| stories of the characters involved. Highly recommended!
| Diederich wrote:
| Seconded! I haven't read through a book that quickly in quite a
| long time.
| throw0101a wrote:
| Also _The Victorian Internet_ by Standage on the history of the
| telegraph:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I think it's also obligatory to mention the longish magazine
| article "Mother Earth, Mother Board"
|
| https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/amp
| schubart wrote:
| > A message took over 17 hours to deliver, at 2 minutes and 5
| seconds per letter by Morse code
|
| A letter in Morse code is made of up to four "dits" or "dahs".
| Why would it take more than two minutes to send one letter?
| pranjalv123 wrote:
| You can read a transcript of the first conversations on the
| transatlantic telegraph[1]. Basically: the signal was very
| weak, they needed a lot of time between symbols, and they
| needed to repeat a lot.
|
| https://www.google.com/books/edition/Report_of_the_Joint_Com...
| joshuahaglund wrote:
| The signal was weak. An attempt at fixing the problem, boosting
| the voltage, caused the insulation to fail. Later cables added
| repeaters along the way to maintain the signal.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable#...
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