Google to lay Asia-Pacific to South America undersea cable

Google says it is building the first ever subsea cable connecting South America to Asia-Pacific, in partnership with Chilean state-run infrastructure fund Desarrollo Pais and the Office of Posts and Telecommunications of French Polynesia (OPT). The 9,200 miles (14,800 km) of cable will stretch from Chile to Australia through …

[alain williams]

Will it add to Google snooping ?

Or will google be forbidden from inspecting traffic and so seeing who is talking to who ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Will it add to Google snooping ?

Who doesn't encrypt it for them to even see? Not many.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Will it add to Google snooping ?

I doubt they would but from a technical viewpoint if you are the MITM then encryption isn't infallible. You couldn't do it on a large scale to be fair.

[Roland6]

“ the first ever subsea cable connecting South America to Asia-Pacific”?

I thought that accolade went to Cable and Wireless, back in the last century.

[JustAnotherDistro]

Unbelievably cheap

$40,000 a mile for intercontinental-capacity undersea fiber optic cable. Comcast quoted me $40,000 for one mile of coax to get internet to my house. Huh.

[collinsl]

Re: Unbelievably cheap

$40k/mile only gets you to $320m so there's an extra $80m in there somewhere to account for.

Probably "bribes"

[Bebu]

"Internet-starved Antarctica."

All those penguins not getting their Linux feed?

Even during the Antarctic summer the total human head count on the continent wouldn't win a decent melee with a group of determined sealions.

I would assume any real demand for bandwidth must be for scientific purposes rather than streaming services, youtube and social media (there have been enough "problems" down there without the usual top-of-the-list sources of internet titillation.) Internet shopping with free worldwide delivery might be interesting. :)

I don't know if cable/fiber is already run between some of the various bases on the continent itself but bringing an undersea cable to land and having it survive the seasonal and moving ice might be an engineering achievement in itself.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "Internet-starved Antarctica."

"...bringing an undersea cable to land and having it survive the seasonal and moving ice might be an engineering achievement in itself."

Yup - the odd lump (aka a few million tons) of ice dropping off the Antarctic continent and floating away, maybe after dragging itself along on the sea floor, might easily break any form of cable connection from some undersea cables stretching a few thousand miles to the nearest land mass?

And I wouldn't want to be the repair man, splicing said cable back together again !

Likewise, any coastal building (serving as a terminus for the said cable) could also easily find itself on a huge iceberg heading for the South Georgia island area.

Maybe they can terminate said cable on a nearby island of rock, and then use a high speed microwave link to jump the last few miles to somewhere on the southern most continent?

[david 12]

"potential" link to NZ, and then "potential" link from Mangawhai to Invercargill, then "potential" link from Invercargill to Antarctica, none of which have been funded.

The Americans are looking for funding for a cable to McMurdo -- they also like the idea that they could lay scientific instruments as part of the cable to their scientific research station. Maybe the Humboldt people are hoping that if the NSA gets funding for a cable to McMurdo, the Americans will want a cable from the Mid-Pacific to NZ. Or maybe it's just PR to get more press coverage.

[david 12]

Humboldt was a celebrity scientist -- there are towns named after him, statues in parks, universities. He's still known for the Humboldt Current in the Pacific Ocean, the Humboldt Mountains in Antartica, his Geographic studies and publications in South America, and the Humboldt Penguin. A particularly felicitous name for a cable connecting South America to Antarctica