$1.5 billion: The cost of cutting London-Toyko latency by 60ms

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/122989-1-5-billion-the-cost-of-cutting-london-toyko-latency-by-60ms

by evo_9 • 14 years ago

156 66 14 years ago

karamazov• 14 years ago

The title of the post makes this sound frivolous, but it actually seems like a worthwhile endeavor. 60 ms * the number of packets sent back and forth is significant; and, as the article points out, it'll also add redundancy to the cable network between Asia and the rest of the world.

bradleyland• 14 years ago

Absolutely. Voice traffic is a big consumer of IP bandwidth these days. The difference between a call made over a link with 170 ms of latency and 230 ms of latency is significant. In conversational terms, the average call participants will start being annoyed at around 300 ms. At 230 ms, any hiccup is going to make the call pretty frustrating. Shaving 30% off that latency buys you some headroom and better general conversational performance.

In a greater sense, voice can teach you a lot about the challenges of network various conditions. You can pick and chose a codec to work around a low bitrate, or even high loss rates, but when working with latency, you're stuck. This looks like $1.5 billion well spent.

egiva2• 14 years ago

Actually, the plan for this arctic cable is mostly driven by the needs of the financial-services industry in London and Tokyo (i.e. high frequency trading, ultra low latency direct market access, etc).

excuse-me2• 14 years ago

I think a more important use of the cable is that it can't `accidentally` be broken by a chinese anchor in the luzon straits.

egiva2• 14 years ago

No on mentions one of the real behind-the-scenes motives for these new lines: Tokyo and London are major hubs for the financial services industry and reducing even 60ms in transmit time means big bucks for High Frequency Trading in these two stock markets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading

helium• 14 years ago

Uhm, did you read the post? That is exactly what they say the reason was.

twiceaday3• 14 years ago

It would be good news for esports. Currently due to latency game companies opt to split the world into regions and sell regionally linked copies of the game.

getsat5• 14 years ago

I don't believe that's the reason. It's a relatively new phenomenon.

If you region-lock your games, then people in Europe/Asia can't buy the cheaper North American version and play it locally.

twiceaday3• 14 years ago

I didn't mean to imply it's on the list of reasons. Just a side effect.

dfc• 14 years ago

Among other reasons...

corin_• 14 years ago

Multiplayer gaming, not esports. There aren't many examples of esports titles that are region-split, and for most esports titles 170ms still isn't a great.

For games like WoW, I imagine it could make a big difference though.

twiceaday3• 14 years ago

I mentioned esports specifically because it is often the case that a Japanese player must play a European player in an online tournament where low latency is crucial. However, in a non-esports multiplayer context the specific opponent and therefore their location is not as important. The matchmaking systems are able to randomly pick nearby (read: low latency) opponents, and games like WoW are regioned simply because of their immense scale.

ars6• 14 years ago

For High frequency trading, wouldn't it be easier to just have a remote desktop?

Is there a reason the trades need to placed so far from the exchange?

adaml_6232• 14 years ago

I think you must realise that there are multiple exchanges involved in the 'market' which these traders operate in. The speed of placing an order is important but the information about other related prices and indices is also very relevant. Getting this information 60ms before other market participants would give you a huge advantage.

ars6• 14 years ago

60ms would make no difference to how fast a human can make a decision. This is for automated trading.

So can't they put a computer near each market that would get the relevant information quickly and place the order quickly as well?

danvk• 14 years ago

Who pays for these cables? Is it the governments or are they entirely privately financed?

excuse-me2• 14 years ago

Private. Either a group of investors do it and look for telco customers to rent bandwidth to. Or cable laying companies like Cable and Wireless will lay a cable if they have spare capacity and try and sell it. Or sometimes a consortium of telcos will lay a cable.

Outside china I can't see a government fronting money for a cable

guelo3• 14 years ago

There is all kinds of activity happening because of the opening of the north west passage including billion dollar bets like this one. But the global warming deniers keep denying. It's baffling.

sukuriant• 14 years ago

Some would argue it's a natural cycle and not especially caused by humans. Other comments in this thread allude to something similar happening in medieval times

guelo3• 14 years ago

Some would be making stuff up and ignoring what scientists have been telling us.

xiaoma• 14 years ago

Anonymous comments on a social website are about the flimsiest form of evidence I can imagine. Anonymous comments alluding to something is a complete waste of time. Please cite something substantial or cite nothing at all and share your own opinion.

gaius2• 14 years ago

Pleasae stop misrepresenting. No-one denies climate change. We just don't think it can be "fixed" by giving all our money to Al Gore and Bono.

Incidentally it was "global warming" that ended the last ice age. Now it's on YOU to show how humans were responsible...

slackerIII• 14 years ago

Now I have new answer for when people ask what value HFT adds.

getsat5• 14 years ago

Isn't "large amounts of liquidity" enough?

bwillard• 14 years ago

This may be a myth. Nanex (http://www.nanex.net/) does a lot of detailed analysis of the HFT. Their view, and it is supported by a lot of data and many very detailed, if not intuitive graphs, is that HTF does not help liquidity.

guimarin• 14 years ago

The first benefit of global warming?

"Until now it has been impossible to lay cables in the Arctic Ocean, but the retreat of the Arctic sea ice means that the Northwest Passage is now generally ice-free from August to October..."

ars6• 14 years ago

May not be the only benefit, during the Medieval Warm Period humanity benefited greatly from increased crop yields and milder winters.

psykotic• 14 years ago

> May not be the only benefit, during the Medieval Warm Period humanity benefited greatly from increased crop yields and milder winters.

"Humanity" meaning Northern Europeans? The MWP led to prolonged droughts and floods throughout other parts of the world.

guelo3• 14 years ago

The medieval warming period was mild compared to the warming we're having now and the warming we're going to have over the next century.

jarek• 14 years ago

Not really the first. Shipping might improve a whole lot if the Northwest Passage opens up more. First commercial ship went through in '08: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/story/2008/11/28/nwest-v...

peteretep• 14 years ago

This seems relevant: http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_o...

It's a talk about how physical geography is being shaped by HFT...

aprescott• 14 years ago

Whenever submarine cables comes to my attention, the one thing I'm always curious about is what happens when they break?

This article links to another they posted[1] and they then link to Wikipedia[2], and there's some exposition given on what happens when things break, but if these things are 3 inches thick and thousands of miles long, other than burying them and having ships nearby to go out and make repairs, is there anything special that the maintainers of these cables do to safeguard against damage? Has anyone covered that in a good article somewhere that I can read?

Not only that, but while a cable is broken, are there redundant cables along the same path, or is traffic routed around the problem via some long detour? Is there a way to see the cut-off from cross-continent round-trip time graphs?

[1] http://www.extremetech.com/computing/96827-the-secret-world-...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable#...

aristus• 14 years ago

There are fleets of cable ships all over the world who are paid a retainer to repair breaks. When losses are calculated in tens of thousands of dollars a second (edit thousands per minute) it's worth it. On the off time they pull up and scrap defunct cables, as they can be a hazard to shipping traffic (think anchors).

moe• 14 years ago

tens of thousands of dollars a second

That seems a little on the high side.

A cable break is expensive, but not 1 billion dollar/day expensive.

latch2• 14 years ago

Artic Fiber has a high level overview of their plans: http://www.arcticfibre.com/maintenance-and-repair.html

icefox• 14 years ago

"All three cables will connect the United Kingdom to Japan, with a smattering of branches that will provide high-speed internet access to a handful of Arctic Circle communities."

I can see it now. You can get fiber in the arctic circle, but you can't get fiber in <insert local town> near <big city>!

aes256• 14 years ago

It figures; it's an awful lot easier to lay cable under the sea than it is to do so in towns and cities.

latch2• 14 years ago

It looks like Artic Link is going to bring it down to 86ms [1] with an initial capacity (surprised they didn't talk about that) of 2FP x 8λ x 40Gbps = 640Gbps.

The Artic Fiber website is full of good information, including expected latency between a bunch of cities, and high level colocation options [2].

All I could find on the Russian initiative was this simple website [3]. Total available capacity is 100WL x 100 Gbit/s, but no idea what phase 1 will be.

[1] http://www.arcticlink.com/home.html

[2] http://www.arcticfibre.com/service-offerings.html

[3] http://www.polarnetproject.ru/

T-Winsnes• 14 years ago

Does anyone know if this would affect latency from Australia to the UK?

mixmastamyk• 14 years ago

Unlikely that a route over the north pole would help. Only if the traditional one were truly horrible.

espes• 14 years ago

The only Australian links with any affordable capacity go through to the US, which is how UK traffic is routed :/

mthreat• 14 years ago

Now I don't feel so bad about spending a month of my time to make our search results page 40ms faster at Indeed.com

btbuilder• 14 years ago

Can headlines be edited? Tokyo is misspelled...

$1.5 billion: The cost of cutting London-Toyko latency by 60ms

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