This is great news for Alaskans. The internet there is terrible and ISPs do a lot of caching that they shouldn't to make up for it (like setting the min TTL for all DNS entries to 7 days regardless of what they get from the server).
Finally they'll be able to get decent internet without all the shenanigans!
For those of you hunting to see the length of the cable like I was, it's 15,600 km long. I wish they'd provided a top-down view rather than a lateral view like they did, since that would make more sense and have the image look shorter.
Anyway...
I wonder if this will have a positive impact on the arctic communities that the cable goes through. Is there any history on technological booms and hubs appearing in places where a new cable went through previously low-occupancy areas?
'grecy -- Bell? Let's hope the costs are driven down. I recall (as a former Whitehorse, YT resident) seeing proposals (but not as big as this articles) come and go, with no positive impact on consumers.
It's looking more likely that the Yukon Government will run their own fiber from Whitehorse->Skagway to tap into the fiber backbone there, cutting out Northwestel.
Doubtful. There are lots of cables on the northern tier between Seattle and the Chicago area that go through rural areas in the Dakotas, Montana, etc and Internet speeds are still not great there.
Terminating a strand in one of these requires active investment so there needs to be a good ROI to do so.
(Just a customer, not affiliated to SRT) We are starting to get fiber to the premises in Minot, North Dakota. It is not a blanket deployment as far as I know but it is happening... albeit slowly. I believe there is a lighted line from here to Bismark if anyone was interested.
I hate that the articles justification was "shaving 24ms off stock and derivative orders" and love that HNs reaction is "how will this benefit local communities".
Really HFT is just a sign that most of the action in finance produces minimal net value - just changing hands. I am more and more beginning to see finance as kissing cousins to real estate - it should be wiped out by transparency and internet messaging.
So will the Alaskans/Canadians who get online through this line have all their traffic routed through Japan or the UK? Or will there be a line through Canada somewhere straight down to the US?
Can someone enlighten me about the real interests behind this venture?
80k people, of whom only a fraction might actually be interested in purchasing internet access is a really small amount compared to the huge cost of the project.
Japanese people aren't very interested in non-japanese websites either, so there is not a huge demand for additional bandwidth to Europe to my knowledge.
Did they get huge gov grants to pull this off or are there actually businesses committed enough to bandwidth purchases that this is likely to be a profitable project?
4th sentence:
"but the investors and companies eager to send information—stock trades, wire transfers—are so intent on earning a fraction-of-a-second advantage over competitors that the US $850 million price tag for the approximately 15,600-kilometer cable may well be worth it."
I doubt all of this takes much bandwidth though and I doubt they're willing to invest huge sums for something everyone will have access to anyway after it's completion.
What makes you think everyone will have access to all of the bandwidth on the cable. It's pretty common for large companies to buy dedicated blocks on bandwidth on long distance links for their own internal private networks and such things are not cheap and often have maximum latency requirements that are nothing to do with financial trading.
London and Tokyo are two of the worlds top financial centers - I don't think this has much to do with general internet access and everything to do with trading.
Any bank / investment company that does high frequency trading and the like where milliseconds matter will have servers located locally in Tokyo or London.
Finally they'll be able to get decent internet without all the shenanigans!