Does Amazon have one? How did you find out Facebook has one coming? I'm assuming facebook needs one for their own data center, and if that's the case then could this mean they want to enter a similar market as AWS?
I wish someone would throw us Australians a bone and build a couple of more cables. We are suffering from some serious congestion issues at the moment because of limited capacity leading out of Australia. It is good to see that companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook realise that bettering bandwidth for consumers will benefit them in the long run.
Just how much money would be required to fix this once and for all, if Australia & New Zealand decided it was a national priority and approached it with an infrastructural rather than profit-oriented basis, with a tolerance for overkill and dark fiber?
I have a suspicion that building 40,000 terabits per second in ~10 undersea links with the rest of the world would be a lot less than 1000x as expensive as building a single undersea link at 40 terabits per second, or one new undersea link every two years of economic pain amidst undersupply. The issue is you couldn't charge end-users 1000x more for it, or even 10x more for it, so it doesn't make any sense for private actors to build: ISPs can't reasonably capture value generated in the economy at large.
From what I'm told, the US built much of its actual fiber-miles count in the late 1990's when projections were that bandwidth usage would grow exponentially for a long time, and we were "running out" (with a high profit margin on each small step forward to add to the supply). Then we figured out how to do wavelength division multiplexing and all of a sudden an existing fiber could carry 100x more information. This led to the existing players going bankrupt, and the "Dark fiber" era, ten years of overshoot before we started digging fiber lines again domestically on a large scale.
This oversupply enabled the Internet in the US to blossom. Last-mile issues were all that existed for the longest time. If we had spent that decade bottlenecked for lack of backbone & backhaul bandwidth, constantly bumping into saturation of the existing links and frenzied construction of new links, the Internet would be a very different place. A more metered place, with a very high degree of rent-seeking by the existing players, and a lot of bandwidth-intensive web ideas killed in their cradles.
Apparently in some other developed countries that joined the Internet scene after this boom & bust, the government made it a priority to provide both backbone and last-mile connectivity on an infrastructural basis without much regard to profit, to even better success than the US.
if Australia & New Zealand decided it was a national priority and approached it with an infrastructural rather than profit-oriented basis
The current conservative government in Australia has decided that internet is a luxury, not a nation-building project, and scuttled the NBN, a project intended to provide infrastructural improvement to the 'tubes. It ain't going to be a 'national priority' here any time soon.
Which is weird, because business benefits from fast tubes a lot more than consumers do, and usually the conservatives are the pro-business politicians.
Especially weird, that now their national long term plans include specifically 'the technology to connect us all together' within the same period of time they canned the NBN!
Agreed. And let's not forget our Kiwi neighbours too.
Amazon and Microsoft (and others) have Australian based cloud services now, so you'd hope that they might invest in future projects that connect us to the rest of the world.
I know SubPartners currently are trying to build up a few undersea cable networks that connect at various points both domestically and internationally.
Australia undersea cables arent the problem, monopoly is. Even your super duper national fiber network has data caps on INTERNAL TRAFFIC. This has nothing to do with intercontinental links, its just greed. Everyone gauges everyone in Australia.
Your internet is like your real estate - plenty around and you still pay stupid prices.
Sadly this is the price of entry for a world class software service these days. You need your own 10gbit + pipes around the planet. Now if someone could make a really heat resistant cable you could make a mint just going straight through the planet to the other side :-).
Microsoft isn't the problem (this coming from someone who didn't take an internship offer on ideological grounds).
They already have that discount (aka government contracts they would get blacklisted for if they didn't agree).
The way to stop this isn't to make snarky comments about Microsoft since that just builds up/reinforces distrust on a random company.
The way to stop this with the same amount of effort is to make snarky comments about the US government/lack of oversight. That will atleast reinforce distrust towards the government. Enough of that will lead to change.
Much of what the government did (and does do) is not techically legal - in that they can not force companies to disclose or backdoor access to information beyond what is listed in the Patriot Act, CALEA and associated constellations of law.
Various mechanisms are used to get partnerships with companies including financial threat (QWest), legal threat (Yahoo), infiltration (Facebook), and appeal (Microsoft, Google). If it is more difficult to get cooperation from a company if they believe that customers will hate, snark and boycott them, or if it will damage their image it will be more difficult for agencies to make deals with companies in extralegal ways.
Discouraging customers from criticizing companies for voluntarily making deals doesn't seem fair to me. I think the OPs misgivings, however informed, are about voluntary rather than compulsed, action taken by Microsoft leadership.
I'm sorry you lost the text - it is so frustrating when that happens.
Getting the government to change itself is a game - and a more opaque one. Which representatives in upcoming elections are clear wins for the way that America is waging cyberwarfare, including its use of domestic surveillance? There are no such choices. The complexity of the issues and the pressing national security concerns (from an awakening Ottoman Empire, revisionist Russia and ambitious China, to the hollowing of an old American-centered European world).
The wise player, I think, doesn't only criticize Microsoft, AT&T, etc. The wise player criticizes all of the players complicit in the game: voluntary actors (like Microsoft), the Administration, shadow government, global incentives, allied interests alike.
(The government itself would say: don't hate us, the player! Hate the world game where we are compelled to reach for these powers or lose control of [y]our global dominance.)
Hating the game means hating it all - not choosing an exclusive player. So I think it makes sense to hate on Microsoft while hating on policy and surveillance law.
Actually, I do feel like tech hasn't doesn't what it could to provide for greater transparency/accountability regarding our elected officials.
Going off on a slight tangent here, but a thought I've had is that politicians aren't just evil/vote along party lines just because. They do it to stay in power. Maybe if there was an app/platform/something that citizens could to go to "pre-vote" on issues or crowdfund issues, maybe people's actual needs would be addressed?
Ideally, a rep would say: here's the app you guys use. I'll vote on everything exactly how my constituents tell me to vote. And, in doing so, just be a direct proxy for the voting public.
In case anyone is interested in more information about the cables, have a note at http://builtvisible.com/messages-in-the-deep/
Disclosure- I built the map