back to article Trans-Pacific FASTER fibre fires first photons, finally

Backed by Google and built by NEC, the FASTER consortium submarine cable has been lit up. The 9,000 km trans-Pacific cable connects two locations in Japan – the Chiba and Mie prefectures – to US hubs covering Los Angeles, San Francisco Bay Area, Portland and Seattle. As well as The Chocolate Factory, the 60 Tbps design …

  1. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

    Read that as "fires first photos", and naturally wondered whether they were cat photos... where is the coffee...

    1. phuzz Silver badge

      The internet is a series of tubes, and those tubes are full of cat-shaped photons.

  2. Jon B

    was wondering why it wasn't landing in Hawaii

    then saw the map of the cable - it brushes the Aleutian Islands to get the shortest fastest route.

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: was wondering why it wasn't landing in Hawaii

      "then saw the map of the cable - it brushes the Aleutian Islands to get the shortest fastest route."

      Yes, it'd be nice if the so-called "hero" image was something useful instead a random "fibre lamp" type image. Is the image editor on holiday again? I'd like that job. Not too much work and lots of holidays.

  3. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Trollface

    Google takes 10 Tbps for cloudy ad-slinging

    I wonder how much the NSA signed on for ?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Google takes 10 Tbps for cloudy ad-slinging

      Less than the bandwidth Chinese hackers will use to download data from the US...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Google takes 10 Tbps for cloudy ad-slinging

        LDS "...Chinese hackers..."

        Asian pR0n in exchange for being hacked. Okay...

        ;-)

    2. Tromos

      Re: Google takes 10 Tbps for cloudy ad-slinging

      "...Google's exclusive access to two of the cable's fibres, each with 100 wavelengths running 100 Gbps"

      That makes 20 Tbps, so I guess the other 10 is for the NSA.

      1. John Sager

        Re: Google takes 10 Tbps for cloudy ad-slinging

        10 there 10 back?

      2. Anonymous Coward Silver badge
        Facepalm

        Re: Google takes 10 Tbps for cloudy ad-slinging

        From the linked article:

        "Google's one of six members of the FASTER Consortium, with sole access to a pair of 100Gb/s x 100 wavelengths optical transmission strands between Oregon and Japan — one strand for sending and one for receiving."

        So 10Tbps full duplex then.

  4. Captain DaFt

    Uses coherent transmission technology?

    So the cable consists of sharks laid end to end?

    Or one realllly long shark?

  5. Alister

    FASTER fibre fires first photons, finally

    Fank phuck for that, finks founder.

  6. P. Lee

    FTFY

    Lay just a little more fibre,

    Run it just a little bit faster,

    Make the web a bit stronger,

    Thanks for data, Goo-Fibre!

    /sorry Christina

  7. Alistair
    Pint

    talk about being caffein deficient in the am

    I was wondering what the golden parachute was for that photon.

    < we need a steaming mug. Coffee/tea will be covered >

  8. Alan Bourke

    So any of you brainiacs

    know how long a bit would take to travel end to end?

    1. Cynic_999

      Re: So any of you brainiacs

      The article gives a distance of about 9000km. Speed in optic fibre varies slightly depending on wavelength & type of fibre, but is around 204m/uS. So I calculate a bit would take about 44mS to travel from end to end.

      If the speed is 100Gb/s, that means that there will be about 4.4G bits in transit along the cable - the cable itself will be "storing" 550MB of data!

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
        Joke

        Re: So any of you brainiacs

        "If the speed is 100Gb/s, that means that there will be about 4.4G bits in transit along the cable - the cable itself will be "storing" 550MB of data!"

        And that's only Googles 1/6th share of the total capacity, there could be up to 6TB in transit at any one instant.. Maybe next time they could use mercury and "store" even more data in it and save on data centre capacity, power and cooling all at once.

        On a slightly serious note, I wonder how much total "storage capacity" the worlds networks have in transit.

      2. another_vulture

        Re: So any of you brainiacs

        ... and at 200 m/us, each bit is 2 mm long for 100 Gbps. As implmented, they actually send 4 bits/Hz on a 50 MHz lambda using a scheme called DPQPSK, and then use a 0.5 FEC scheme to encode e.g. 100 bits into a 200-bit FEC block, for a speed of 100 Gpbs of data bits.

  9. Tom 7

    60Tbps

    Coo - that's 20000 times the data rate of TAT8 I worked on 35 years ago or so! I'd guess it was nearly as fast as this one tho! Well, when in the photon phase anyway.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wowsa fast

    I hope they wired in jacks all the way along the cable. That way people lost at sea can watch YouTube videos and leave comments asking for help.

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