First-ever fiber optic cable between U.S. and India via Brazil and South Africa | Hacker News Reader

First-ever fiber optic cable between U.S. and India via Brazil and South Africa

iafrikan.com

76 pointsiafrikan21 comments

One of my all-time favorite Wired articles is "Mother Earth Mother Board". It is the epic adventure tale of laying down fiber in some unforgiving environments.

https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

I came to the comments section to make sure this article was posted, it's such a fantastic read. If you read it and are hungry for more, check out "How the World Was One" by Arthur C. Clarke. It's a fascinating history of telecommunications with a large focus on submarine cables.

https://www.amazon.com/How-World-Was-Arthur-Clarke/dp/055307...

Not knowing much about the cable market I fail to see the import of this. Touching at South Africa seems to be quite the detour between the US and India from my point of view.

NYC to India is something like 13000km via the Mediterranean.

NYC to South Africa is about the same distance.

South Africa to India is about 7000km, so that's the additional distance with this route. But perhaps it's more reliable, there are a lot of ships around Europe.

The Suez canal is full of fibre optic cables [1], don't think reliability is a big issue.

Latency through existing cables US<->Europe<->India is likely lower.

[1] https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

According to that map they don't actually go through the man made canal. They go overland through Egypt.

You're right, but they go through the Gulf of Suez which is still an extremely busy area.

It sounds like a lot but that's only about 40-70 milliseconds additional round-trip time which for a lot of things isn't that big of a deal.

40 milliseconds is a huge deal.

Indeed. A big, giant, unqualified, huge deal.

I for one am definitely concerned about server lag on my FPS server, as one example of an extremely important mission-critical application.

In the world of high frequency trading, 40-70ms is a lifetime. This is more of a big deal than cutting off 40-70ms for some FPS game.

as I said 'unqualified' big deal -

It's only a huge deal in some contexts..

Ignoring this within a critique is in my opinion 'focusing on ping times' hence possibly flawed and probably not so clear analogy.

Exactly; this route crosses a lot less international waters and busy sea routes, so less chance of accidental or intentional sabotage, as well as a back-up if the Mediterranean route is somehow broken.

Together, Brazil and South Africa have 150 million internet users[1]. At least in Brazil (with which I'm familiar) the connectivity inside the country is quite decent (read "usable"), but most international connections use slow and older networks. This project, together with the one connecting Brazil to Spain[2], will certainly be very beneficial to users in there.

[1]: http://www.itu.int/net4/ITU-D/idi/2016

[2]: https://www.reuters.com/article/spain-brazil-telecoms/spain-...

The title is "First-ever fiber optic cable between U.S. and India via Brazil and South Africa". You explain the individual segments. I still don't see the appeal of the entire route.

I think it’s that there are two fiber companies and one was working on New York to São Paulo and São Paulo to Cape Town. The other was working on East London, SA to Puducherry and they signed a joint provisioning agreement.

It doesn’t read like they got together beforehand to discuss the best way to connect New York and Puducherry, rather they were both making connections to South Africa and chose to connect their new routes together afterwards.

It’s an odd way for an African news agency to write about two major undersea cables landing in South Africa.

depends on what perspective you are viewing it from.. this is great news for SA since they now have direct to USA & much more direct to asia..

(admittedly i'm not in the loop on what was there already)

- Increased connectivity to SA and surrounding countries (Angola, Namibia and Mozambique come to mind)

- Shorter latency between India/SA and US/SA

I agree, it doesn't seem very important w.r.t India-US data transfers

According to the Submarine Cable Map (linked elsewhere in the comments), there are already a number of cables between the USA, SA, and IN.

Is it the "contiguous" nature of this cable that is so novel?

In retrospect, I am very sorry for neglecting Brazil in my list.

great development - will not only help networking reliability between USA and India but for whole of South Asia.

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