Microsoft Invests in 3 Undersea Cables to Improve Data Center Connectivity
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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
Reminds me of one of the most memorable articles i ever read (1996). http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive//4.12/ffglass_pr.html
It's crazy long, i still remember how heavy that issue was.
http://www.hibernianetworks.com/corp/wp-content/uploads/2013...
Why do you think contributing to cables would imply they want to compete AWS?
It's not necessary for a data center, they might want it to reduce latency, to reduce operational costs or to increase bandwidth.
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.
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.
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.
Your internet is like your real estate - plenty around and you still pay stupid prices.
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibil... http://www.viawest.com/data-centers/oregon/brookwood-data-ce...
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.
Your mind is shaped by what you read.
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.
So you give msft shit. Ok, some other corp will take its place. Change the way the government works, maybe you fix the cause rather than the symptoms.
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.
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.