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Facebook, Microsoft Finish Installation of 160 Tbps Subsea Data Cable

Raevenlord

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It might come as a surprise to some that the actual majority of global communications is done via subsea cables that connect continents - and people - together. This editor remember being dumbfounded at the mere idea of this whilst reading Frank Schätzing's "The Swarm", some 9 years ago. However, the installation of subsea datacables isn't new; in fact, the first ever recorded datacable installation occurred in 1850 - though it was simply used for telegraphy. The times change, though, and nowadays, there are cables that can transmit 160 terabits per second connecting continents. According to Microsoft, that's more than 16 million times faster than the average home internet connection, making it capable of streaming 71 million high-definition videos simultaneously.

One such is the new MAREA cable, laid down across the Atlantic by a Microsoft/Facebook joint operation, which connects Bilbao (northern Spain) to Virginia Beach, in Virginia. The cable is settled more than 17,000 feet (five kilometers for us metric system junkies) below the surface of the ocean and measures more than 4,000 miles (again, 6,400 kilometers) in length. It weighs nearly 10.25 million pounds (around 4,629 tons) and is situated along a route south of existing transatlantic cables, which should ensure more resilient and reliable connections for customers on both sides.





Subsea datacables are enormous feats of engineering, and are currently the stewards of worldwide communications. They usually feature designs with seven distinct layers that surround the optical cables, ensuring their protection from the unusually aggressive conditions they're laid in. The new MAREA cable is built through a new "open" design that allows it to evolve with technology, which will likely come in handy for Microsoft's estimate that cross-border internet traffic is expected to increase eightfold by 2025.



There are now millions of cables doing heavy-duty data transmitting underneath our seas. Cool trivia: due to the nature for these cables and all the communications that pass through them, it's not uncommon for these to be cut and rerouted in efforts of war, as it happened in the First World War. Tapping the cables is also a non-trivial occurrence, of which there are accounts of.




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Any ideea how much it cost the whole operation, including cable and cabling cost?
 
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I like how Vaseline is part of the cable.
 
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CAPSLOCKSTUCK

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Can't wait the time when we'll achieve sub 50ms latencies between Americas and Europe. Right now gaming with Americans and vice versa is a bit of a dung...
 
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Can't wait the time when we'll achieve sub 50ms latencies between Americas and Europe. Right now gaming with Americans and vice versa is a bit of a dung...

Wait til you try playing games with your EU friends from South Africa :( If you're lucky you have 180ms latency
 
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@Raevenlord you were doing so well with the metric stuff up until this point: "It weighs nearly 10.25 million pounds (around 4,629 tons)"
 

Frick

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Wait til you try playing games with your EU friends from South Africa :( If you're lucky you have 180ms latency

Which still is pretty amazing considering the distance and geopolitical regions the data has to go through. And that is while gaming, simple ICMP messages are probably way faster, from me to Australia I can do a ping with about 350ms latency. Depending a bit on which countries I have to pass, some routes are definitely faster than others.
 

bug

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They should have used cat6. I hear that's pretty awesome :D
 

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Can't wait the time when we'll achieve sub 50ms latencies between Americas and Europe. Right now gaming with Americans and vice versa is a bit of a dung...
sorry, but unfortunately we can't bend laws of physics or remove the numerous routing devices inbetween...
 

Frick

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15 years ago, we'd also call fiber optics "bending of physics". But it's a norm these days...

Naah, they've been in commercial use since the 70's. During the Internet boom in the 90s crazy amounts of fiber optics were dug down all over the place, and a lot of it was in use for a long while and probably still is.

The fourth generation of fiber-optic communication systems used optical amplification to reduce the need for repeaters and wavelength-division multiplexing to increase data capacity. These two improvements caused a revolution that resulted in the doubling of system capacity every six months starting in 1992 until a bit rate of 10 Tb/s was reached by 2001. In 2006 a bit-rate of 14 Tbit/s was reached over a single 160 km line using optical amplifiers.
 
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Back then having cable or DSL was peak of technology. No one had fiber optics at home. It was solely interconnection between ISP's and data hubs.
 

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Back then having cable or DSL was peak of technology. No one had fiber optics at home. It was solely interconnection between ISP's and data hubs.
Still, installing last mile fiber-optic does not bend the laws of physics.
 
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sorry, but unfortunately we can't bend laws of physics or remove the numerous routing devices inbetween...
Since you can never go FTL over a cable, I don't see much improvement over latency in the next 50 years. Probably it will cap somewhere around 150ms because of hardware routers improvement, signaling process, etc
 
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I am only looking forward to the upcoming FTTH by Reliance, and how they utilize the new AAE-1 cabling. It's the world's largest in 15 years and especially geared towards low latency among continents in addition to better bandwidths. My life as a MMOFPS gamer is shitty at best because of fucking ping. All of my nice hardware seems like a waste because of this 1 thing. The things I do for a few milliseconds.....pffffffffffffffff :banghead::banghead::banghead:
 
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