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Comment by ximeng | Hacker News Reader

400MM USD project, of which from the map about 15% of the distance is AU-NZ, 85% is NZ-US. Population of NZ is 4.4MM people, so less than 100 USD per person. Maybe a crowd sourcing effort could get some of the way there in exchange for bandwidth, or wide equity investment in a project company. Possibly some funding from users on the AU / US sides as well.

Also for the security concerns, can you do an external audit of the equipment? How much does it cost for somebody to strip down some chips and do the necessary reverse engineering? You would think this could be costed out as an additional cost due to the trust gap between the countries, then the security issue becomes one which can be resolved but at a cost that is potentially not competitive rather than just a political issue where one side appears not to have interest in free trade.

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It's not a case of some chips though. To be sure, you would have to do it to every chip you used - and even then it'd be quite possible you've missed something.

Realistically this is about power rather than espionage. In a similar way to how the booming US displaced Britain of a lot of the major international cables around the turn of the 1900s, so China will want to try it.

Not sure what you mean about displacing Britain, but sounds interesting, can you elaborate?

I would have thought you could structure a deal to maintain power where necessary so that China can't come in and cut off your bandwidth, but maybe not.

Regarding the chips, I wouldn't have thought you need to be 100% sure, 99.9% might be good enough if you can get there by random sampling of significantly less chips than 100%. In any case, that cost analysis is what's required and that's the case e.g. Huawei are making here.

There are reasons to be careful in dealings with the Chinese, but it might be better for both sides if some level of transparency can be maintained.

Wouldn't there be a problem with vendor support? Presumedly you'd have something in the contract where they'd fix things that break when it's their fault. That would include hardware and firmware. For the later, they might just insist that remote access is the only way they can fix it. If you need to upgrade the firmware then you need to do the audit all over again. Maybe an open source firmware would help, but at the end of the day you still need a vendor you can trust.

The US will probably not allow the cable to land on their side if it was made using chinese components, so even if they did manage to crowd source 400MM, it wouldn't work.

Could they land it in Mexico or Canada instead?

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