Microsoft springs for new undersea cables to link US, UK, Asia Microsoft has invested in two new cables to connect its North American data centers with facilities in Ireland, and it says it will soon help build similar data networking links to Asia. "Over the past 9 months, Microsoft has been significantly investing in subsea and terrestrial dark fiber capacity by engaging in fiber …
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Specifically to keep them off their back. If they can control both ends, I wouldn't be surprised if they threw some encryption on top.
Although I would find it hilarious if at some point Microsoft started twisting the NSA's balls by threatening to release patches for all the court-ordered back-doors...
" Speaking of the Bill / Halo icon, how are you doing that? Its not in the list of usable icons..."
The validation form simply checks that a 'chosen' image exists, so if you manually manipulate the form, it will be <accepted even if the image name is one of the old ones rather than the listed current ones!
"...yet we're lucky to get 10Mbps on land. What am I missing here? AND, it's over COPPER!"
Speak for yourself. I can get 850 Mbps. And that is measured via a third parties speed test site, that is routed out of the country and then back into the country. So that is pretty real world.
Though it sucks that Rackspace's servers can only manage 350 Mbps.
Google has 6 pair and 60 Tbps. Does that match current practice (not labaratory stuff, but real deployments)? My knowledge is out of date. In the early days, we had 10 Gbps per lambda and 160 lambas (1.6 Tbps), and then 40 Gbps in 80 lambdas (3.2 Tbps), all in the C band. So what are we doing now? Faster lambdas (say, 100 Gbps)? more bits/Hz (different modulations)? Use of wavelengths outside of the C band?
Going to 100 Gbps, you still need 100 lambdas. Squeezing them all into C band would be messy. Higher modulations would be "interesting," not in a good way, and going outside of C band would require some type of dual-band amplifiers since EDFAs only cover C band.
I guess they could be using "cisco math" and calling 5 Tbps in each direction "10 Tbps". That might work with 50 lambdas of 100Gbps in C band without too much magic.
Answering my own questions. Its a sign of getting old when you are talking to yourself. The practical state of the art has advanced since I went to sleep about 10 years ago.
Each fiber on Google's FASTER cable runs 100 lambas x 100 Gbps. The lambdas are at a 50 GHz spacing, and this made possible by using a modulation called DPQPSK to encode 4 "raw" bits/Hz and a FEC code (roughly rate 1/2) to get an encoded rate of 2 data bits/Hz. The optical C band supports up to 120 lambdas at this spacing.
Microsoft is using the NCP cable. NCP uses all of the lambdas to achieve 120 x 100 Gbps.
No magic math is involved. The cables get this simplex rate in each fiber.
100Gb/s per lambda is pretty common stuff now days (I've commissioned a number of these systems) and 400 is starting to make its way into the market.
You can get 88 lambdas in the C band if using a 50GHz fixed grid, but the latest systems support flex-grid with variable spacing, so higher numbers of lambdas are possible, depending on the mix of bit rates.
Somehow, I take Microsoft's plans a lot more seriously than Kim Dotcom's.
So I assume New Zealand will have to wait another 40 years for decent bandwidth.
Between Microsoft's and Google's cables landing here- Ireland has to have the highest rate of connectivity with the outside world, per head of population...... Not that I'm gloating- but a 250Mb connection for less than £30 is nice! However- the flipside of that coin is- I can video conference with the US or even South Africa- better than I can sustain pure data links from one side of Ireland to the other.......As for voice calls- I don't know if any of you have ever visited our scenic northwest- or Yeats country as the tourist board like to call it. Its a complete data black hole. Its quite interesting how every few hours, as the air pressure changes- you phone picks up sufficient signal to pull down text or e-mails- before going off the grid again, awaiting another weather change. Actually making phone calls involves waiting for the copper lines to be repaired after the latest weather related broken cables- or a hike up the local mountain to get line of sight with a mast 10-15 miles away- which curiously you can get a 1.5G/2G voice connection on (after a 30-40 minute vigorous hike, in wellies, and a rain coat..........) but not data........
Connectivity is funny.
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