120 Gigabit Pipe To Oz Begins Operation 236
dustpuppy writes: "The new Southern Cross Cable Network connecting Australia to the US is now operational. Featuring 120 Gigabit capacity and with a latency of 70 msec, the new trans-Pacific cable is 120 times the capacity of the existing Australasia/North America connection. Now us poor Aussies can download our mp3s that much faster! You can read more about it here." Interesting, too, how it's constructed. From the article: "The network consisted of two separate cables configured in three self-healing rings, with all three rings to be completed early next year. The duplicate-ring construction gave the network greater redundancy - if one side of the network was damaged or became inoperable, traffic could be transferred to the other side instantly." Neat.
Re:The whole world of Wireless Internet ... (Score:1)
I don't know about the rest of the stuff, but if I were the one designing it, I would have made it so that you could easly string newer faster/better cables so you wouldn't have to re-dig everything.
Chris C.
Thankfully NZ is linked up as well (Score:1)
2.5 Terabit/s cable planned, Singapore to India (Score:1)
when completed, it will (temporarily) be the largest capacity undersea cable in the world.
http://www.businessworldindia.com/archive/200911 /mktg2.htm
skip to near the bottom for:
Re:Whose next? (Score:1)
Re:Plate tectonics (Score:1)
Re:70 ms latency (Score:1)
Where have I seen this...? (Score:1)
No, wait, that was Jaws 2.
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In Sydney terms.... (Was: Re:Silly map) (Score:1)
Both locations are light-industrial with a small population of IT type stuff.
The interesting thing about it is that both Alexandria and Brookvale are about 10Km inland from the sea. I haven't figured that bit out yet...
Re:70 ms latency (Score:1)
I had this visual of this computer with somesort of interface that had x number of physical ports on it...kinda like a LOT of serial ports or something just sitting there.
Odd.
I can get to .au but not to a lot of the US (Score:2)
Re:meter distance (Score:1)
Great, now the Spammer's Paradise gets faster. (Score:1)
Just what the world needed, a group of nations in the South Pacific with more bandwidth for sending spam. Anyone ever see Telstra's toothless AUP?
spamparadise.mp3 [orca.bc.ca] (Mirror this please, don't kill my ISP)
Re:New Zealand has the WWW-IntErnet too! (Score:1)
Southern Cross? (Score:1)
Australian sport fishing television (Score:1)
"Today on Sport Fishing Television we see the amazing catch of a truly monster Great White Shark, and you'll be truly amazed what we find when we split open its belly - 30 thousand kilometers of fiber optic cable - What a monster!"
</ACCENT>
AOL (Score:1)
Re:Yet more proof that the Internet is American... (Score:1)
There really aren't many South Korean websites that constitute a demand for direct Japan-SK. connections. Europe is currently at the stage of internet development that N.A. was in say '97, '98, hell they still have internet cafes. Once the local content goes up, local telcos. will start building extra-N.A. network infrastructure.
netrek (Score:1)
We used to joke about netrek being a network testing tool - it was one of the first real-time multiplayer Net games.
Those were the days (even if Australia did get thrashed by CMU playing with 750ms satellite lag on an Australian server).
Danny (ICMP Redirect).
Re:Not Just bloody OZ either (Score:1)
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Re:Filter speeds (Score:2)
Basically, the government is *totally* uninterested in censoring the net - it just likes the legislation so it can point to it and convince the wowsers that it is doing something to protect the Children. While I dislike this kind of thing, I would prefer a situation of bad legislation being ignored to bad legislation wreaking havoc by enforcing it.
Re:70 msec? (Score:3)
Have fun!
Link.
Re:Dont forget New Zealand!! (Score:1)
70ms, i could do better! (Score:2)
Time is Change.
Re:Jesus Christ (Score:1)
grow a brain ass hole
Re:The whole world of Wireless Internet ... (Score:2)
Re:Jesus Christ (Score:1)
get a clue
Re:Where the hell are the Zentraedi? (Score:1)
Re:That's 3000 mp3s per second. (Score:4)
But then it's like most (usually lying) women say: "it doesn't matter how big the mp3 is, only how long you can maintain your connection."
Re:Poor Ausies (Score:1)
ever heard of Project Echelon? collaboration between US and australia for monitoring phone conversations, internet traffic etc.. for terrorist activity
email me if you're interested and ill give u some URL's
Official Site + general latency (Score:4)
While I'm here, someone mentioned that 70ms is pretty slow for this type of connection - which amazes me, because it blew me away that they could get it that low. (remember, we're talking 1 direction latency here - not ping times, which would atleast be double)
A quick calculation:
A quick check of the net tells me that the distance from Sydney (where the cable is landed in .au) to Los Angeles is 7487 miles (according to a travel agent flight distance site - who knows?), or about 11979km. (pretty similar to the diameter of the earth, which is 12742km)
The speed of light is roughly 299,792,458 m/s so, the best (according to current physics :/) time we can do is about:
39.957 milliseconds
Just at the speed of light we lose almost 40ms, then they've gotta switch it at several points along the way, and while optical switches EXIST, it seems unlikely they're doing optical switching yet.
All in all I reckon the 70ms figure is AMAZING..
Re:New Zealand is sharing some capacity with Oz (Score:1)
Re:Map of Australia's Links to the US (Score:2)
There's a whole bunch of others owned by different Telcos and stuff. It's a messy picture, and no one provider (or even two providers) has been able to offer a good (read fast + reliable) service out of the country.
Re:AOL (Score:1)
Re:Public Infrastructure - Optus End-User Agreemen (Score:1)
Re:Whose next? (Score:1)
if so it's the normal crappy view of the rest of the world that most westerners have
you can't ban Doom if no-one has a PC!!
and the last time i looked the people Johannesburg (check sp!) weren't naked
too much bandwidth? (Score:1)
I'm a fan of more bandwidth as much as the next guy, but what price does this come to for the Aussies so they can "be just like the Americans"? 120 Gb redundancy connection. Not to mention, they won't be sharing this with anyone; this single pipeline connects Australia with the US. How many people does Australia have in comparison to Asia or North America? I'm too lazy to do this, but someone calculate average Kbit/sec/person for the continents, assuming everyone was online and accessing some obscure document in the US, say, the front page of Slashdot. (:
Re:Plate tectonics (Score:1)
Australia-centric (Score:2)
The whole world doesn't revolve around Australia, Slashdot. How about some American articles for a change?
</parody>
-Legion (donning Euro-flame-proof suit)
Whose next? (Score:3)
If only... (Score:3)
70 ms latency (Score:5)
70 msec? (Score:2)
Filter speeds (Score:3)
Or are they going to forgo their censorship?
You're too impatient, light is slow :). (Score:3)
Network distance from Australia to USA is about 15,000km, noting that the network is a ring and it's said to be 30,500km long.
15000/300000=0.050 seconds=50 ms.
So 70ms is not too bad, considering that the speed of light in fibre optic cables isn't as fast as in space, and there is probably some network latency at the ends and the repeaters.
That's why I'm an HPB. It's about 150msec(Pacific Ocean) + 120 msec (56K modem signal processing time) + 50-100 msec for various internetwork latencies. So I end up with 370msec on a good day.
Cheerio,
Link.
Re:Official Site + general latency (Score:3)
(a) light travels slower in glass (fibre optics)
(b) it does not travel straight, but bounces off the edges of the fibre optics line.
I wonder ..... (Score:2)
Routing through the mideast is a little dicey given the political instability. The infrastructure costs make a fat pipe via siberia a real pain.
The point is simply redundancy, as well as opening up the net to other areas of the world. a fat pipe going through that part of the world would help this out tremendously.
Re:Two separate cables? (Score:3)
See Map of network [southerncrosscables.com] for details.
/me pinches himself (Score:2)
Re:Stadium Info Theory (Score:2)
__________________
Re:Plate tectonics (Score:2)
__________________
Think DWDM (Score:2)
Re:That's potential bandwidth, folks.. (Score:2)
Most large providers seem to be going for packet over SONET for IP traffic, and will ultimately go for MPLS alongside this. Eventually, SONET may well disappear or shrink as DWDM-native protection/failover becomes available. The good news is that the ATM cell tax is going away, and the cost of managing networks is going down (every node will be an IP or MPLS router, or an optical switch). See http://www.mplsrc.com for more on MPLS, it provides most of the benefits of ATM with much less complexity and overhead.
Re:I'm an off-topic geek... but I can't help it (Score:2)
--
Stadium Info Theory (Score:2)
What I find weird is the topology. Suppose all the people in the stadium were using a chat room to taunt each other. If they all use AIM, they've created an ad hoc network with its hub on one side of the planet and its nodes all on the other. And if they use various other interoperating chat networks, it gets even more complicated.
Of course to the Freenet [sourceforge.net] folks, all this dispersion is not weird, but useful...
__________________
I'm an off-topic geek... but I can't help it (Score:3)
Actually, the speed of light is _exactly_ 299,792,458 m/s. That number is what defines a meter. :-)
Re:The whole world of Wireless Internet ... (Score:2)
2) high frequency RF, needed for any kind of bandwidth, tavels in straight lines.
3) They run the cable all that way becuase that's where the data is, and that's where the market is.
4) Furthermore, they run the cable all that way because it's a bigger, safer investment.
10 years? we're still using undersea cable that's been down for 25 years+.... don't understimate just how much data that is.
The company laying the network... (Score:2)
Their main site is here [southerncrosscables.com]
and a nice little animation which shows how the network works is here [southerncrosscables.com].
Re:Coopers Sparkling Ale (Score:2)
Actually, I think Pale Ale is generally considered to be better. I enjoy them both, and Cooper's Dark Ale, too.
Re:Official Site + general latency (Score:2)
The different between single and multi mode fibre is the "mode". A mode basically means a frequency of light, so in single mode fibres we use monochromatic light ( I think it's 1550nm).
Most longhaul fibre optics are single mode, because the attenuation is much less (think multimode fibres not as optimized : losses as you described in your post). In single mode fibres, the losses are generally due to the fact that geometrical optics is just an approximation of the true nature of light.
I wasted a year of my life designing fibre optic networks. At least now I can show off my "knowledge" in
Back to the future? (Score:2)
The result was that he singlehandedly saturated the cross-Rockies pipe. The rest of us plebes with less-than joined-at-the-hip access to the national net got to deal with massive latencies (well over 300ms on average).
With this new pipe to Australia, it looks like we may be back to the old trick of it being faster to send a packet pan-pacific, than to the next province. (though for happier reasons).
Oh, never mind. I currently get 45ms to a machine in Edmonton... still better than the Southern cross pipe.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Re:70 ms latency (Score:2)
Get this: we are using 7+ GHz serial channels to move the data around the box (input linecard to fabric to output linecard). When you factor in the speed of electrons across the wires, the length of the wires, the data rate per serial link, and the number of parallel serial links that make a channel, at any given time, there can be a complete 64 byte ethernet min size packet living only on 20" copper wires.
Also, we are making a switching decision every 300 ps (trillionths of a second).
Willie
Re:Southern Cross? (Score:2)
The Southern Cross is a well-known constellation in the southern hemisphere - as well known as the Plough/Big Dipper is in the northern hemisphere.
In fact, Australia's flag has the Southern Cross constellation on it, just like Alaska's flag has the Plough/Big Dipper (Ursa major).
Re:My US Packets (Score:2)
1 core3-vic.melb.vch.com.au
2 Cont1-0.wel3.Perth.telstra.net
3 Fddi0-0.wel-core2.Perth.telstra.net
4 GigabitEthernet4-0.wel-core3.Perth.telstra.net
5 GigabitEthernet4-0.wel-gw1.Perth.telstra.net
6 Pos1-1.paix1.PaloAlto.telstra.
7 paix-f2-5.exodus.net
Mind you, all of the packets from my home machine go through Sydney *sigh*
Plate tectonics (Score:4)
I'm not sure about the Pacific floor, but I know the Atlantic floor is expanding -- so this applies to trans-Atlantic cables at the veyr least.
As the plates expand at the rate of [inces/feet?] per year, what happens to the cables? Is the growth small enough that the cables won't stretch to a critical frailty until after they've outlived their usefulness?
Re:I'm an off-topic geek... but I can't help it (Score:2)
Re:Made in Canada (Score:2)
//rdj
Map of global connections? (Score:2)
This is pushing the topic a little bit, but is there a map or other representation of the bandwidth that various countries/continents have coming into/going out of them?
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Re:70 ms latency (Score:2)
Re:Fosters...NOT Australian for Beer (Score:2)
They don't even bother advertising the stuff here in Australia anymore.
Actually, I was having a drink (Victoria Bitter) in a pub just yesterday, and I asked one of my colleagues: "Have you ever seen an Australian drink Fosters other than under duress?".
He answered in the negative. (Under duress includes no other beer available!)
fairfax link; $10M for 155 Mbit/s for 15 years (Score:3)
"A 155 megabit circuit between Sydney and California, licensed for 15 years, which cost $US10.3 million, was discounted by 18 per cent if purchased before the November sales deadline."
It cost about 20c/MB retail for bandwidth in aus. This works out to a markup of 1400 times (see 1) between long term and short term prices.
I hope this link does bring down retail prices.
1) $ 10300000 / (15years * 155megabit * 52weeks * 7days * 24hours * 60minutes * 60 seconds) = 0.014 cents / megabit
I think i worked it out correctly
My US Packets (Score:2)
4 GigabitEthernet3-0.cha-core3.Brisbane.telstra.
5 Pos0-3.ken-core1.Sydney.telstra.net
6 Pos2-3.wel-core3.Perth.telstra.net
7 GigabitEthernet4-0.wel-gw1.Perth.telstra.net
8 Pos1-0.paix1.PaloAlto.telstra.net
9 * paix-f2-5.exodus.net
Perth? What the hell are you doing in Perth? That's the wrong side of the country?
Re:Filter speeds (Score:2)
i'd like to be... (Score:2)
"We've already got one customer connected," Mr Stokes-McKeon said.
imagine that you had that whole pipe to yourself.
Re:Whose next? (Score:2)
Re:70 ms latency (Score:2)
Yes! I've always been infatuated with the concept of how fast we can move information. In high school, one of my favorite physics problems was about a radio DJ, and figuring out which took longer: the time the EM wave takes to get to the receiver, or the time his voice takes to get to the mic? (It depends on distance and I forget the numbers, but the mic took longer.)
Re:Whose next? (Score:2)
Look at http://www.globalcrossing.com for instance, with its funky network maps - good stuff for infrastructure junkies! If you look also at their implementation strategy (namely, cross atlantic, and so on) you can get an idea about where they expect to pull a lot of revenue from (build the low risk things first), and Asia is certainly there. Despite the recent hiccups in the Asian business environment, it is seen as an up and coming region.
That's potential bandwidth, folks.. (Score:2)
In order to reach the press release bandwidth, you'd need to toss an OC-192 on every possible wavelength of every fiber in the cable. Riiight. Keep in mind that these beasts are managed by corporations, which are political by their very nature. Efficiency is not their strong point. Also remember that this whole network was designed for circuit-based telecommunications traffic, not the packets most Slashdotters are familiar with. The process of making the twain meet is not a straightforward one.
Most telco networks don't run at anywhere near 100% utilization. Admittedly, wet cable is expensive stuff, so it's not often wasted. But if anyone believes that the ring could carry that amount of traffic NOW, all I can say is, stick to your software and avoid telco networks, for everyone's benefit.
Furthermore, fiber of this sort doesn't directly affect the internet. You don't simply jam a transcontinental fiber into your Ethernet card, folks. Packet and circuit networks don't get along with each other. First, you cram your packets into an ATM stream, then you wrap the ATM data in a SONET transport layer. If you're using a really big ATM switch, you might be dealing with as much as an OC-48's worth of bandwith in one chunk here. But we're not done yet...
See, you don't want to plug that OC-48 straight into the fiber, because then what would happen when you want to add more? So you're going to use the signals coming from your routers as tributaries to feed a big honkin' optical terminal like an OC-192. All the SONET payloads from the various tributary interfaces will be concatenated and shot out the high speed side. The lasers in said terminal will be tuned to a particular wavelength, and used to feed a DWDM coupler. Finally, the multicolored signal will head to the beach and go for a swim. Several Erbium-doped amplifiers later, (search for EDFA and do some reading!) the signal emerges in another continent and the whole process reverses itself.
Keep in mind that any one company probably doesn't buy bandwidth in chunks larger than OC-12. Your packets will move more freely, yes, but nobody's gonna be seeing 120 Gigabits any time soon. The amount of paperwork, and the sheer number of companies that're involved in simply setting up one circuit, is phenomenal.
Oh, and as far as survivability goes, that's old news. SONET was designed from the ground up to incorporate a redundant ring architecture. The data's always transmitted over two fibers at once, and the receiving device picks the cleaner of the two incoming streams. Network planners are careful to route the two paths diversely, so no one failure can bring down the ring. Ideally, someone can backhoe an entire fiber conduit and not knock down any traffic because every ring served by that conduit was ALSO served by another one on the other side of town. Ditto goes for undersea cables.
I'm this close to setting up a little site to introduce computer geeks to telco concepts, so y'all don't keep swallowing these press releases whole. Anyone wanna help?
Re:The whole world of Wireless Internet ... (Score:3)
Looked at another way: 250 MHz bandwidth at 26 GHz is a Q of 100.
more fun for me! (Score:2)
Now I can see koalas and kangoroos go about their daily lives eating the euycaliptis trees and bouncing around carelessly. A whole new avenue of NET entertainment has come my way!!!!
happy happy joy joy
Re:Whose next? (Score:2)
Over half of this new pipe was paid for by the NZ telco Telecom. [telecom.co.nz] and from their press releases they plan there will be no spare bandwith by 2002
But the coolest thing about the cable has to be the cable healing robot robot [southerncrosscables.com]
; ;
bats = bugs
Re:WTF (Score:2)
Correction make that post 74.
Ok now I remember I am insane.
Good: Everything is normal.
Now we can spend more $$$$ (Score:2)
A bigger step forward would be for the US Backbone providers to come up with an equitable cost arrangement.
Isn't Japan already? (Score:2)
Re:70 ms latency (Score:2)
Re:70 msec? (Score:4)
Re:70 msec? (Score:3)
Selective enforcement (Score:2)
There is the possibility of selective enforcement. Nobody is getting punished so everybody does it. But if the State, the judge or the local boss dislikes you, they can use the law against you.
__
That's 3000 mp3s per second. (Score:2)
So you could pretty much transfer everything on Napster over there in about 43 seconds.
1 128Kbps MP3 ~= 5MB
WTF (Score:2)
I Moderated this as Informative and it got marked as Funny.
Moderation Totals:Interesting=1, Funny=1, Total=2.
I don't get the joke.
Re:Oh boy... (Score:2)
"Speeds up to 70mph" makes sense; "Speeds up to 70ms" does not.
Maybe I should have been more clear on this one; I had thought the quote would be enough.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
Re:Thankfully NZ is linked up as well (Score:2)
The whole world of Wireless Internet ... (Score:2)
This is good now, but what about when this becomes yet "another slow line" ... now you have a nice cable running to america .. that's about it.
Good idea ... works for about 10 years ... then what?
Re:Filter speeds (Score:2)
The censorship in place in Australia restricts what you can have available on your server, not what you can download from overseas. At no point on the network is filtering mandatory.
Now they've got the bandwidth there... (Score:2)
We've been hanging out for this for years (Score:3)
That's largely because my provider is crap, but also because the only usefull way out of the country is by a fat link on the other side of the country. Theres lots of landline to carry traffic, and it seems to get broken a lot. The second route ex-Sydney is oversubscribed, and is useless as a contingency when the main one dies.
I'll be the first to admit scepticism that this thing would ever be completed, but now that it is, the whole world changes for US. A whole bunch of new world-class providers will move down here now, instead of the second rate crap we've had to date.
Map of Australia's Links to the US (Score:5)
Re:Official Site + general latency (Score:2)
Note that this information is only sort of accurate, it's just what I've gleaned from discussions with people who really know what they're talking about. If you'd like to get a more scientific picture of what's going on, go here:
http://www.testmark.com/de vel op/fiber/fiberoptic.html [testmark.com]
Fosters...Australian for Beer (Score:5)
Australian for "More Porn"
54% Slashdot Pure
Thank God... (Score:2)
"If ignorance is bliss, may I never be happy.
Re:The whole world of Wireless Internet ... (Score:3)