Building backbone network infrastructure | Hacker News Reader

Building backbone network infrastructure

code.fb.com

AT&T didn't think they could make money on the route? If we have monopoly telecoms shouldn't they be providing this as part of "universal service" etc, part of the reason they get to be the monopoly? ( I'm sure I remember reading some justifications about that in the long ago)

Just how much money and how big a company do you have to be to undertake something like this? Since the railway right of ways got snapped up it seemed there'd be no possibility of real infrastructure until perhaps the government noticed the lack of it. Perhaps this shows that logjam is breaking.

AT&T doesn't have a monopoly on long-haul fiber. There are several providers FB could have purchased the capacity from. FB did a build vs. buy decision and build came out on top.

How big do you have to be to construct your own long-haul fiber network if long-haul fiber isn't one of your core businesses? FB, Google, Amazon, Microsoft big.

I'm not an expert in this area, but I imagine that AT&T will sell you connectivity over their existing backbone which isn't going to be as short as a direct route. Also, the amount of connectivity that Facebook wants might be so high that AT&T would have to run new fiber anyway so it's cheaper for Facebook to own the fiber and cut out the middleman.

The route only has this much traffic because Facebook has a data center nearby.

Paying massive capex to support one customer puts you in a bad negotiating position.

Whoever made that promo video. Wow, great work there. Love the visualizations.

They said they are going to sell fiber to others. Here is the TOS

<joke>

Using our fiber is free, but you have to allow us to capture all the traffic.

</joke>

Is there a non-Facebook link?

I believe this is a post by Facebook about Facebook engineering. I may be wrong, but I think that it is a facebook blog thing.

code.fb.com is their technology blog, so, no. This is the original (and non-facebook in a way) source.

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