back to article Google to build private trans-Atlantic cable from US to France

Google has announced its first private trans-Atlantic cable, with landings at Virginia Beach in the US and on the French Atlantic coast. Named Dunant (after Henry Dunant, founder of the Red Cross), the cable will go overland to follow a terrestrial link to the Chocolate Factory's cloud region in Belgium. At the US end, the …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Google braced for giant Android fine from EU

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44858238

    Is the release or timing of the story about 'laying trans-atlantic cables' really about dangling a carrot in front of the EU? Hit us hard and we won't help build out more infrastructure projects like this... Android-Fine: "The commission's approach... would mean less innovation, less choice, less competition, and higher prices," Google global affairs chief blogged.

    1. Claverhouse Silver badge

      Re: Google braced for giant Android fine from EU

      "The commission's approach... would mean less innovation, less choice, less competition, and higher prices," Google global affairs chief blogged.

      Although we must all be worried about Google not making enough money, this fear-mongering crap is getting a bit passé, and rather evokes repulsion than sympathy.

      I don't really see any great harm in slower innovation ( aka less money flowing to Google and the others ) considering the phenomenal progress made in the last century, plus the fact by 'innovation' they mean another Facebook app;

      Choice is diminished progressively, not an enormous concern, whilst Google and say, Microsoft, are never synonymous with 'choice' anyway;

      Ditto competition --- ( and on the other side of the world from Europe, in the Land of Competition there seems to be a dearth of choice even between internet providers across America );

      Higher prices ? the usual bogey. Which rarely seems to eventuate with them lowering prices.

      .

      I might take Google more seriously as an internet keeper if I hadn't discovered last week that Chrome/Chromium doesn't even respect the hosts file..

    2. ckm5

      Re: Google braced for giant Android fine from EU

      It's more likely due to Brexit and the fact that most (all?) trans-Atlantic cables terminate in the UK. Having data going through a 3rd country with different laws (esp. when added to the GPDR) is likely to be an issue.

      They probably needed more capacity anyway, so bypassing the UK was just a routing decision.

      1. Korev Silver badge

        Re: Google braced for giant Android fine from EU

        A lot do go through the UK, but many also go to France, Spain etc. There's a nice map here.

        1. paulf
          Big Brother

          Re: Google braced for giant Android fine from EU

          @Korev "There's a nice map here

          Nice map but cripes, look how many terminate at Bude. That's only pissing distance from the spooks over at Morwenstow. That can't be a coincidence can it?

          1. Martin Summers Silver badge

            Re: Google braced for giant Android fine from EU

            "Nice map but cripes, look how many terminate at Bude. That's only pissing distance from the spooks over at Morwenstow. That can't be a coincidence can it?"

            No, it isn't.

      2. eldakka
        Coat

        Re: Google braced for giant Android fine from EU

        > so bypassing the UK was just a routing decision.

        The Internet will route around damage...

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Google braced for giant Android fine from EU

        It's more likely due to Brexit

        Yeah, all those immigrant photons being turned away at the border, having to hide in the back of trucks to get to Europe.

    3. andy 103
      FAIL

      Re: Google braced for giant Android fine from EU

      I came on The Reg to see if they'd actually covered the main story - a record breaking fine for Google. But no, plenty more people give a shit about an undersea cable, apparently.

      They'll probably report it in a few weeks, when they've woken up.

      1. paulf
        Facepalm

        Re: Google braced for giant Android fine from EU

        @andy 103: "I came on The Reg to see if they'd actually covered the main story - a record breaking fine for Google. But no, plenty more people give a shit about an undersea cable, apparently. They'll probably report it in a few weeks, when they've woken up."

        Resident Google Critic Andrew Orlowski published this at lunchtme: Fork it! Google fined €4.34bn over Android, has 90 days to behave

    4. TheVogon

      Re: Google braced for giant Android fine from EU

      "Is the release or timing of the story about 'laying trans-atlantic cables' really about dangling a carrot in front of the EU? "

      I can't imagine that the EU gives a crap about one fibre cable among many.

      "The commission's approach... would mean less innovation from Google, less choice from Google, less competition from Google, and higher prices from Google"

      TFTFY.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Will the cable have privacy shielding?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "Will the cable have privacy shielding?"

      I'm sure Echelon will ensure their taps are very private.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Data Feast

      Just another noodle in the Atlantic "Spaghetti" Ocean.

  3. ckm5

    Google was down longer

    Outage started at 12:16 and, according to our tech support @ Google, took out all of storage and most of networking SDNs worldwide. Affected companies included SnapChat, Spotify and Pokemon Go. Even Google's enterprise support portal was offline.... Had to resort to the phone and call support....

    For us, we noticed almost as soon as it happened and migrated to a backup system in ~10 minutes. Which is good as an extended outage can cost our clients upwards of $1m/hr.

    I was surprised the Reg had no story about it, it was a pretty massive outage. It seems every time AWS belches there is a story about how AWS is doomed, Google must have much better PR people...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Google was down longer

      I was surprised the Reg had no story about it, it was a pretty massive outage.

      Could that be due to the fact that all the El Reg Hacks use Gmail and .... {other google services}

      Thus when the Chocolate Factory hiccupps they won't know about it until after the fact.

      Avoid Google, Facebook and the rest of the SM slurp factories. There is a world outside Social Media and Google (and certainly Amazon)

  4. Neil Barnes Silver badge
    Coat

    If the Atlantic is so narrow...

    how come it takes six hours to fly across it.

    Someone is lying to me!

    1. frank ly

      Re: If the Atlantic is so narrow...

      Also, why does the cable get thinner further out into the Altlantic?

      1. -tim
        Coat

        Re: If the Atlantic is so narrow...

        The water pressure must be squeezing it smaller.

      2. Christian Berger

        Re: If the Atlantic is so narrow...

        "Also, why does the cable get thinner further out into the Altlantic?"

        Probably because there is less danger to the cable out there. It's unlikely, for example, that a ship will anchor in the middle of the atlantic near the cable.

        I could imagine that that cable would be gradually covered by sediments over times.

      3. Kernel

        Re: If the Atlantic is so narrow...

        "Also, why does the cable get thinner further out into the Altlantic?"

        As the cable gets deeper it has less protection - shore end cable can be 100mm or more in diameter, deep sea sections are often 25mm with no external protection at all.

        At various times in its career the cable has to be suspended off the arse end of a ship - when there's up to 10km of briny underneath that's an awful lot of cable hanging off the thing you're living on at the time, so you want it to be as light as possible. One of the specs of submarine cable is the 'modulus', which is basically a measure of how much cable can be supported by the cable before it snaps under its own weight. This effectively determines how deep it can be laid.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: If the Atlantic is so narrow...

          "One of the specs of submarine cable is the 'modulus', which is basically a measure of how much cable can be supported by the cable before it snaps under its own weight."

          No, I think you'll find the modulus is the stiffness of the cable in tension; i.e. how much it stretches for a given amount of applied tensile force. Some Young chap came up with the concept a while ago.

          You may be thinking of "Tensile Strength"....

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Trollface

      Re: If the Atlantic is so narrow...

      It's the stop-overs in the secret mind-control centres en-route.

      Jet lag? Nah, effects of anesthetic.

      The more you know...

    3. Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse

      Re: If the Atlantic is so narrow...

      And also, someone think of the dolphins as they are just about to be mown down by a big red long-line trawler most probably owned by the Spanish.

      1. DropBear

        Re: If the Atlantic is so narrow...

        I always wondered what happens with cables whey they cross inter-tectonic rifts: do they go down all the way into the rift and emerge on the other end? Or do they just span those dangling freely over the chasm, like a high-tech rope for Spongebob to hang out his square pants to dry on...?

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: If the Atlantic is so narrow...

      The earth is flat so take out the false curvature and the distance may look small but it's actually quite far away. The image shows this perfectly thus proving the earth is indeed flat.

    5. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: If the Atlantic is so narrow...

      "how come it takes six hours to fly across it."

      Bring back Concorde. Less latency is Googles aim!

  5. -tim
    Pint

    How many repeaters?

    Undersea cable was about $7 per meter for the deep sea stuff a few years ago. The real cost is the repeaters that are every 100 to 200 km along the line and used to cost about $1,000,000 each.

    I would hope that Google would put in more fibers and have them bypass the repeaters for real world research on long links. A decade ago there were 12,000km links in labs but way too slow. If I were them, I would be putting in the normal repeaters for 4 pairs and then at least a dozen pair bridged the whole distance terminated in rooms somewhere at each end were researches can test real links with new equipment.

    1. ratfox

      Re: How many repeaters?

      Undersea cable was about $7 per meter for the deep sea stuff a few years ago. The real cost is the repeaters that are every 100 to 200 km along the line and used to cost about $1,000,000 each.

      If your numbers are correct, the cable costs as much as the repeaters. Since $7 per meter for 100 to 200 km means $700,000 to $1,400,000 of cable between each repeater.

      Speaking of which, it got me interested in where repeaters get their power from (the undersea cable includes a power cable, apparently), and how the repeaters work at all (I got as far as "Solid-state amplifiers" and gave up on understanding the rest).

      1. Christian Berger

        Repeaters are avoided

        Repeating the signal means demodulating, regenerating and remodulating it. This means that you'll be forced to know the modulation scheme in advance. So if some time in the next 10-20 years a new technology comes along, you cannot use it. The advantage of repeating is obviously that you don't amplify the noise.

        What's done instead is to use optical amplifiers. There are several types. One obvious one is a laser. Unlike normal lasers which have mirrors on both ends to have an ever growing avalance of photons, you don't have mirrors there, but send in your signal on one side, and it comes out amplified on the other side.

        Raman amplifiers use non-linear properties of the fibre and use one strong laser to turn those properties into amplification.

        1. Kernel

          Re: Repeaters are avoided

          "Unlike normal lasers which have mirrors on both ends to have an ever growing avalance of photons, you don't have mirrors there, but send in your signal on one side, and it comes out amplified on the other side."

          The most common amps are Erbium Doped Fire Amplifiers (EDFAs) which consist of a short (few metres) length of fibre doped with the mildly radioactive element Erbium.

          This section of fibre is connected in series with the working fibre and is also feed with energy from 'pump lasers', whcih are solid state lasers operating at a slightly different wavelength to the working passband of the amplifier.

          The energy from the pump lasers causes some electrons in the Erbium atoms to jump up a couple of energy levels - they almost immediately spontaneously drop back one level ( emitting random photons which appear as noise in the amplifier output) but are reasonably stable in the intermediate level. An incoming photon from the optical signal strikes one of these electrons, which causes the electron to drop back to its base energy level, in the process emitting a photon which is identical to the original photon which crashed into it - as the original photon is not destroyed by the collision, you now have two identical photons in place of the original one - repeat this many times and you have a working optical amplifier.

          Other doping agents can be used, but Erbium is the one that works best in the long range 1550nm band.

          Raman pumps are useful on long spans that are otherwise unamplified, but can cause issues due to the high power levels involved (I've worked on Raman systems that transmitted an pump wavelength at +28dBm up the receive fibre) due to secondary effects which add to the noise and signal distortion - not to mention a tendency to do things like destroy connectors if there is even the slightest trace of dirt in them.

    2. Jellied Eel Silver badge

      Re: How many repeaters?

      I would hope that Google would put in more fibers and have them bypass the repeaters for real world research on long links.

      There's a simple reason for low fibre count.. The weight, and the challenges of attaching the repeater (aka 'torpedo') to the cable. So the deep sea cable is about 1" in diameter typically, with a hefty copper conductor to power the torpedo string. Then insulation and waterproofing, and armour wire to protect and support the cable. More fibres means more electronics inside the torpedo, which means more weight, which means more stresses on joints. Or just the weight of the cable in general.

      Cable routes are carefully surveyed and planned to avoid ending up with dangling cables over trenches, ridges and stuff that may abrade the cable. Especially if there are deep currents that may make the cable swing, or shift. Weight is a big issue for laying the cable because it's dangling from a ship on the surface to the sea bed. Then if there's a fault, a cable ship uses a special hook anchor to lift the cable back to the surface.

      Hibernia had some good videos showing cable laying procedures and repair processes, including how armour wire is welded and wire-wrapped around the torpedos to make a strong enough joint to avoid snapping.. Which is especially awkward given you'd then have to find the cable end(s) again and fish them back up to the surface.

      As for 'research' fibres. Given the cost of transatlantic cables, there's no money in it. Or necessarily any benefit given the effects of long fibre runs are easily simulated or replicated on dry land with some large piles of cable drums. There has been some neat science done though, eg using the conductive elements of the cable to measure and monitor magnetic fields.

      1. Kernel

        Re: How many repeaters?

        "So the deep sea cable is about 1" in diameter typically, with a hefty copper conductor to power the torpedo string."

        The copper conductor isn't as heavy as you might suspect - it's normally just a thin tube of about 8mm (guestimate, as I no longer have a piece here to measure) diameter surrounding the inner core of fibres and steel protection wires. Each amp (connected in series) normally requires about 2 amps at 50 volts, so the ability to handle high voltage is more of an issue than the current involved - if memory serves, the cable insulation is rated at 25kV and I've seen one installation that was feeding positive 14kV from one end and negative 14kV from the other. The circuit between landing stations is completed via the 'sea earth' at each landing station.

        1. Jellied Eel Silver badge

          Re: How many repeaters?

          The copper conductor isn't as heavy as you might suspect - it's normally just a thin tube of about 8mm (guestimate, as I no longer have a piece here to measure) diameter surrounding the inner core of fibres and steel protection wires.

          It all adds up. So a transatlantic cable might be 6500km shore-shore.. which ends up being pretty heavy. Then like you say, each amp needs power and space in the torpedo, so more amps to power that, more coppper and more weight. Then there's the black art of figuring out spacing, which can be a cost/risk problem as well as the technical considerations. It's a fascinating bit of the telecomms business and highly specialised. There's some really neat physics that goes into squeezing more capacity out of existing cables.

          During the .Com bust, there were concerns that the combination of margin squeeze on capacity might mean cable ship operators going bust.. Which would have caused quite a few problems. A fair chunk of the O&M costs for wet capacity go towards funding the ships and maintenance/protection activities. Luckily they got more business running power cables for wind farms and survived.

    3. JeffyPoooh
      Pint

      Re: How many repeaters?

      -tim suggested, "...can test [really long] real links with new >>equipment<<."

      You may have misspelled >>physics<<.

  6. Milton

    What about contingency?

    Whenever I read stories about undersea cables I am reminded that the only institutions equipped to sever them are navies, all of which are operated by governments, none of which can be trusted in the slightest, especially in times of warfare. And 'warfare' might cover more than missiles, these days, what with the rise of asymmetric ops and cyber-tactics. (One might also wonder about the security of landing zones and dry infrastructure: perhaps a radicalised nutjob could perform prodigies of economic harm with a crowbar and a can of petrol ...?)

    Perhaps this seems like a paranoid viewpoint. But I would suggest that at the very least, major businesses should think hard about figuring out what happens when they lose, say, their transatlantic cables, or those to the Far East. If you were to map high-bandwidth seafloor cabling you might be surprised at how so few wires carry such vast torrents of information—I'll stick my neck out and make a wild guess that if you charted the routes, the nodes, the traffic and the operational criticality of the latter, you would find some horrifying dependencies. This spectacle, visualised, could be extremely sobering.

    It is extremely difficult to maintain ultra-high bandwidths without cable—and of course, satellites can be disabled or even shot down—but I wonder if we are devoting enough truly "innovative" thinking to other means of securely and reliably moving data wirelessly. Satellite TV and various web wheezes would suggest we are not exactly asleep on this, but who is actually looking at practical wirwless fallbacks if oceanic cables are lost? Some very clever work has been done on degradation-resistant encoding-and-encryption systems for potentially unreliable pipes, but more can be done. What could be achieved with state of the art laser tech, and satellites stationed in high defensive orbits, or even at Lagrange points? Latency might be high, but that is easier to cater for than crippling loss of overall bandwidth.

    I'm not expert on this, though I've worked on the degradation-resistant stuff, so I'd be interested to know what readers think.

    'operational criticality':: clumsy phrase, and not an easy thing to estimate, I think: but basically I mean "Assess how much direct economic and other consequential damage (e.g. reputational; data breach; fractured tactical/strategic decision-making loops; loss of competitive advantage; etc) might accrue from sustained interruption of the data pipe"

    'innovative':: as compared with today's use of "innovative" to mean "incremental features no one asked for or needs"

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What about contingency?

      The prospect of Google suffering a catastrophic loss of service in a time of global conflict makes the latter seem quite appealing somehow

    2. Peter2 Silver badge

      Re: What about contingency?

      What could be achieved with state of the art laser tech, and satellites stationed in high defensive orbits, or even at Lagrange points? Latency might be high, but that is easier to cater for than crippling loss of overall bandwidth.

      Nothing.

      There is no such thing as a "high defensive orbit". If you can toss something into geostationary orbit then it doesn't matter how "high up" the target is, you can still hit it. Remember that Russia, China, the US and the EU have the demonstrated ability to throw things out of orbit with existing launchers.

      Frankly, if things are so serious that every satellite in orbit has been blown away and the submarine cables have been cut then I suggest that you might as well just stick to bouncing really short wave radio off the ionosphere and call it a day, since you'll probably find that a very major war is underway and that anything deployed to try and provide better comms (fleets of blimps or aircraft deployed as repeaters) is probably going to face some form of interference. Like jamming, or simply finding that your planes/blimps get shot down or one of your base stations gets bombed.

    3. JeffyPoooh
      Pint

      Re: What about contingency?

      Milton offered, "...the only institutions equipped to sever them are navies."

      There was a documentary about splicing in a Y-branch to service the western bit of South America (maybe Ecuador?). One of the first steps was to drag the cutter along the ocean floor to slice the cable. They left a buoy and went off to splice in one end, then came back to find (searching) and retrieve the other end to splice in another end.

      Point being: Step 1 was to intentionally drag for and cut the cable in situ.

    4. Kernel

      Re: What about contingency?

      "Whenever I read stories about undersea cables I am reminded that the only institutions equipped to sever them are navies,"

      And any passing trawler, ship with its anchor dragging, etc. Even a recreational fisherman can get an anchor caught and cause grief and consternation even if it doesn't result in an outage.

      I've even been involved in an event where a thruster was pushed through the land section of a cable, breaking some of the fibres but, more importantly, tripping out the power feeding resulting in the repeaters (it was an older cable) ceasing to function so even if some fibres did survive they were of no use.

  7. msknight

    Thank you....

    I now have that song stuck in my head.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Anyone else look at the graphic and see Speedos?

  9. WibbleMe

    Does it come with access ports for spook submarines or ---- Cut here ---- makers for anchors

  10. 2Nick3

    Love the dolphins!

    Such a nice touch to the image.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Arrrr, time to sharpen me anchor

    The Black Pig setting sail soon...

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