I don't see any citation here for the 13% figure or how they arrived at this. It superficially seems like they considered any cable which FB/Meta were part owner of to be owned by them?
That FB/Meta is buying into cable systems does not surprise me, considering how the submarine cable industry is structured and the massive scale of FB/Meta. Cables have massive massive capex to build and relatively tiny opex. The cost structure is completely front-loaded and if you want to be paying the lowest cost prices and you have a large enough requirement, the best way to do this is to be part-owner on cable systems (or an IRU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indefeasible_rights_of_use).
Edit a bit because I see this line here: partial ownership over 13% of the world's total length of backhaul infrastructure
Basically they are adding up the length of all the cables where FB/Meta have any ownership interest (or perhaps just IRUs) and dividing by the total number of submarine cable length. This is wrong for a number of reasons. These cables are shared in a number of ways. Firstly, each cable contains multiple fiber pairs, in some of these FB/Meta is using only 1 of 6 pairs. Secondly, each fiber is further subdivided by extremely precise DWDM technology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-division_multiplexi...) which allows multiple signals to travel along the same fiber. Finally (and less commonly) fibers are divided into segments. This is more common in SE Asia and Africa where a single cable is really a system which may land at 10++ locations, each segment can be a unique route, or sometimes some fibers in the system bypass some locations, sometimes some fiber pairs completely bypass some landing points. Sometimes just some optical channels within a single fiber are diverted to a landing point! The total system design is incredibly complicated and reducing it to this 13% figure is poor. It is completely plausible that on some of these systems that FB/Meta are using <1% of the design capacity.
Yeah title framing is a little misleading. They are track to be a part owner of 13% of subsea cables. The article is clearly focused on Meta but I don't think they're an outlier among big tech. Pretty sure Google is the only big tech company to own their own private cables and they have a bunch.
Amazon has them too, anyone with a huge datacenter footprint and massive traffic to shift is going to want to own (part of) these systems eventually, it's extremely low risk and great reward.
There is an exception to big tech companies collaborating with rivals on the underwater infrastructure of the internet. Google, alone among big tech companies, is already the sole owner of three different undersea cables, and that total is projected by TeleGeography to reach six by 2023.
Google has built and is building these solely owned-and-operated cables for two reasons, says Vijay Vusirikala, a senior director at Google responsible for all of the company’s submarine and terrestrial fiber infrastructure. The first is that the company needs them in order to make its own services, such as Google search and YouTube streaming, fast and responsive. The second is to gain an edge in the battle for customers for its cloud services.
Physical damage is insured away. It's possible the insurance policies exclude (nation state) terrorism but any good nation state terrorist is going to do it in the most deniable way possible, probably by having a fishing boat "accidentally" drag anchor over your cable.
The scary thing is it's not like the links are going unused, so nation state terrorist could severely cripple the Internet with a small number of accidental anchor drags.
Being a part owner of a subsea cable is effectively buying a percentage of bandwidth on said cable. But "Meta is buying bandwidth" doesn't sound as scary.
Calculating fiber pairs -> bandwidth is much much harder though and is an implementation detail which will absolutely change over time. I have no doubt that part of why FB/Google/Amazon want to own fiber this way (owning dedicated pairs) is so they can experiment with different WDM technologies.
Their capacity for failure in the overall system is far higher than the traditional companies who are selling circuits and must design things for many nines of reliability.
Yes, the submitted title broke the site guidelines, which ask: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(Submitted title was "Meta will own 13% of global submarine cables by 2024". We've reverted it now.)
Submitters: if you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Thanks for updating it, but, my comment was less about the title and more about the article which uses the 13% but fails to mention how they calculate this and I (pessimistically) think it's intentional because if you do a better calculation the number is probably more like 1% and 1% sounds a lot less scary than 13%.
Also, I feel special now that you replied to one of my comments, thanks for all your work to keep HN a civilized place :)
I really wish Amazon would take charge of the internet infrastructure. I prefer customer obsessed infrastructure Amazon than spyware and adware companies like Google and Meta.
There's a war out there, old friend, a world war.
And it's not about who's got the most bullets.
It's about who controls the information:
...what we see and hear, how we work, what we think.
It's all about the information.
I feel this seems reasonable in an economically liberal context, but I would hope there's enough regulatory apparatus to ensure they can't do shenanigans as a result of their holdings.
Also, I feel these kinds of things would ideally be managed by the state - in the same way that highways are? I mean, data is 'the commons' as a public sidewalk. I loathe to think some of our governing bodies are not up to the task, but, by gosh, they should be.
If I'm reading this right they aren't really buying the cables, they're just buying reserved capacity on existing cables. This makes sense. Amazon, Google, and others do the same. It's a good way to make sure your data gets across the ocean even when everyone else is trying to do the same thing.
I'm no fan of Facebook but this seems like a case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't" and/or looking for something to complain about. If they didn't fund/build their own cables, these same people would be griping that they're using more than their fair share of available bandwidth. Facebook has a bunch of bits that need to be sent, so they're paying for the infrastructure to send them. What's the problem?
I like how the title keeps reminding us, that Meta is Facebook. We need to keep this in mind and remind ourselves of that, so that they cannot wean themselves from their previous scandals.
Am I the only one who sees a strange distribution of cables around the globe? A bunch in California, 1 in South America connecting maybe Buenos Aires and Rio, and zero in Oceania.
Also interesting to note the Bering Strait is not used, despite it being the only land almost connecting the West and the Far East.
57 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadThat FB/Meta is buying into cable systems does not surprise me, considering how the submarine cable industry is structured and the massive scale of FB/Meta. Cables have massive massive capex to build and relatively tiny opex. The cost structure is completely front-loaded and if you want to be paying the lowest cost prices and you have a large enough requirement, the best way to do this is to be part-owner on cable systems (or an IRU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indefeasible_rights_of_use).
Edit a bit because I see this line here: partial ownership over 13% of the world's total length of backhaul infrastructure
Basically they are adding up the length of all the cables where FB/Meta have any ownership interest (or perhaps just IRUs) and dividing by the total number of submarine cable length. This is wrong for a number of reasons. These cables are shared in a number of ways. Firstly, each cable contains multiple fiber pairs, in some of these FB/Meta is using only 1 of 6 pairs. Secondly, each fiber is further subdivided by extremely precise DWDM technology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-division_multiplexi...) which allows multiple signals to travel along the same fiber. Finally (and less commonly) fibers are divided into segments. This is more common in SE Asia and Africa where a single cable is really a system which may land at 10++ locations, each segment can be a unique route, or sometimes some fibers in the system bypass some locations, sometimes some fiber pairs completely bypass some landing points. Sometimes just some optical channels within a single fiber are diverted to a landing point! The total system design is incredibly complicated and reducing it to this 13% figure is poor. It is completely plausible that on some of these systems that FB/Meta are using <1% of the design capacity.
There is an exception to big tech companies collaborating with rivals on the underwater infrastructure of the internet. Google, alone among big tech companies, is already the sole owner of three different undersea cables, and that total is projected by TeleGeography to reach six by 2023.
Google has built and is building these solely owned-and-operated cables for two reasons, says Vijay Vusirikala, a senior director at Google responsible for all of the company’s submarine and terrestrial fiber infrastructure. The first is that the company needs them in order to make its own services, such as Google search and YouTube streaming, fast and responsive. The second is to gain an edge in the battle for customers for its cloud services.
I’ll just leave this here.
https://www.politico.eu/article/everything-you-need-to-know-...
It kinda is. Interestingly a lot of these seem to be divided up by fiber. E.g. for CAP-1 it's a 6-pair system, FB/Meta own 5, Amazon owns 1.
This is from https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/trans-pacific/c...
I'm not sure what their source is though.
Calculating fiber pairs -> bandwidth is much much harder though and is an implementation detail which will absolutely change over time. I have no doubt that part of why FB/Google/Amazon want to own fiber this way (owning dedicated pairs) is so they can experiment with different WDM technologies.
Their capacity for failure in the overall system is far higher than the traditional companies who are selling circuits and must design things for many nines of reliability.
Submitters: if you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Also, I feel special now that you replied to one of my comments, thanks for all your work to keep HN a civilized place :)
https://www.networkworld.com/article/3359239/facebook-gets-i...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk0Mzci2Sks
Simply one of the greatest films of all time.
"Listen, when I was in prison I learned that everything in this world, including money, operates not on reality, but the perception of reality."
"Stock market? Currency market? Commodities market? Small countries?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09LJJB7dVTU
I know he's the "bad guy" but I suspect I (many of us?) have been subconsciously channeling Cosmo since I saw the movie as an impressionable kid.
[to his henchmen] Cosmo: Kill my friend.
wait, radio—
wait, tv—
wait, social media is going to control the world.
radio: media
tv: media
facebook: media
All prior guesses have always been right, but information control changes name and shape every few decades. :)
Reminds me of the transformation of the character Media to New Media in the TV show American Gods.
Also, I feel these kinds of things would ideally be managed by the state - in the same way that highways are? I mean, data is 'the commons' as a public sidewalk. I loathe to think some of our governing bodies are not up to the task, but, by gosh, they should be.
Also interesting to note the Bering Strait is not used, despite it being the only land almost connecting the West and the Far East.