We have long been accustomed to the fact that large IT companies are engaged not only in the release of products and the provision of services, but also actively participate in the development of Internet infrastructure. Google's DNS, Amazon's cloud storage and hosting, Facebook's data centers around the world - fifteen years ago it seemed too ambitious, but now it is the norm that everyone is used to.
And now, the four largest IT companies represented by Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook have reached the point where they began to invest not only in data centers and servers directly, but also in the backbone cables themselves - that is, they entered the territory that has traditionally been the area of responsibility of completely different structures. Moreover, according to the findings , the mentioned quartet of technological giants swung not just at terrestrial networks, but at the main transcontinental communication lines, i.e. on all of us are familiar submarine cables.
The most surprising thing is that there is no urgent need for new networks now, but companies are actively increasing the bandwidth “in reserve”. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to find clear statistics on global traffic generation thanks to numerous marketers who operate with dimensions like “65 million posts on Instagram daily” or “N search queries on Google” instead of petabytes that are transparent and understandable to technical specialists. We can cautiously assume that daily traffic is ≈2,5*10^18 bytes, or about 2500 petabytes of data.
One of the reasons modern backbone networks need to expand is the growing popularity of the Netflix streaming service and the parallel growth of the mobile segment. With a general trend towards an increase in the visual component of video content in terms of resolution and bitrate, as well as an increase in the consumption of mobile traffic by an individual user (against the background of a general slowdown in sales of mobile devices around the world), backbone networks still cannot be called overloaded.
Let's turn to :
It's hard to visually tell how many new tracks have been built, and the service itself is updated almost daily without providing a clear history of changes or any other aggregated statistics. Therefore, we turn to older sources. According to information already , the capacity of existing intercontinental backbone networks in 2014 was about 58 Tbps, of which only 24 Tbps were actually used:
For those who angrily stretch their fingers and prepare to write: “I don’t believe it! Too little! ”, we recall that we are talking about intercontinental traffic, that is, it is a priori much lower than within a particular region, since we have not yet curbed quantum teleportation and cannot hide or hide from a ping of 300-400 ms.
In 2015, it was predicted that a total of 2016 more km of backbone cables would be laid across the ocean floor between 2020 and 400, greatly increasing the capacity of the worldwide network.
However, if we turn to the statistics shown on the map above, specifically about 26 Tbps of load with a total channel of 58 Tbps, natural questions arise: why and why?
Firstly, IT giants started laying their own backbone networks in order to increase the connectivity of the elements of the internal infrastructure of companies on different continents. It is precisely because of the previously mentioned ping of almost half a second between two opposite points on the globe that IT companies have to excel in ensuring the stability of their “farm”. These questions are most acute for Google and Amazon; the first began laying their own networks back in 2014, when they decided to "throw" a cable between the east coast of the United States and Japan to connect their data centers, about which . Just to connect two separate data centers, the search giant was willing to spend $300 million and stretch about 10 kilometers of cable along the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
If someone did not know or forgot, then underwater cable laying is a quest of increased complexity, ranging from immersion of reinforced structures up to half a meter in diameter in coastal areas and ending with endless landscape exploration for laying the main part of the highway at a depth of several kilometers. When it comes to the Pacific Ocean, the complexity only increases in proportion to the depth and the number of mountain ranges on the ocean floor. Such events require specialized vessels, a specially trained team of specialists and, in fact, several years of hard work, if we consider laying from the design and exploration stage, to, in fact, the final commissioning of a section of the network. Plus, here you can add the coordination of work and the construction of relay stations on the coast with local governments, work with environmentalists who monitor the preservation of the most inhabited coastline (<200 m depth) and so on.
It is possible that new vessels have been put into operation in recent years, but five years ago, the main cable layers of the same Huawei (yes, the Chinese company is one of the leaders in this market), there was a solid queue for many months to come. Against the background of all this information, the activity of technological giants in this segment looks more and more interesting.
The official position of all major IT companies is to ensure connectivity (independence from common networks) of their data centers. And here is what the underwater maps of different market players look like according to the data :
As you can see on the maps, the most impressive appetites are not with Google or Amazon, but with Facebook, which has long ceased to be “just a social network”. There is also a clear interest of all major players in the Asia-Pacific region, and only Microsoft is still reaching out to the Old World. If you simply count the marked highways, you can find out that only these four companies are co-owners or full owners of 25 trunk lines already built or finally planned for laying, most of which stretch towards Japan, China and all of Southeast Asia. At the same time, we provide only statistics on the previously mentioned four IT giants, and in addition to them, Alcatel, NEC, Huawei and Subcom are also actively building their own networks.
Overall, the number of privately owned or privately owned transcontinental highways has grown significantly since 2014, when Google announced the previously mentioned connection of its US data center to its Japan data center:
In fact, the motivation “we want to link our data centers” is not enough: companies hardly need linking for the sake of linking. Rather, they want to isolate the transmitted information and secure their own internal infrastructure.
If, however, you take a tinfoil hat out of the drawer, straighten it and pull it tighter, then you can formulate a very, very cautious hypothesis of the following plan: now we are witnessing the emergence of a new formation of the Internet, in fact, the global corporate network. If you remember that Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft account for at least half of the world's traffic consumption (Amazon hosting, Google search and services, Facebook and Instagram social networks and Windows desktops from Microsoft), then you need to get the second hat. Because in theory, in a very vague theory, if projects like Google Fiber (this is the one in which Google tried itself as a provider for the population) appear in the regions, then now we are witnessing the emergence of a second Internet, which so far coexists with the already built . How dystopian and delusional this is - decide for yourself.
Only registered users can participate in the survey. , you are welcome.
Do you think this is really like building a “parallel internet” or are we just suspicious?
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Yes, it seems.
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No, they just need a stable connection between data centers and there are no threats here.
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You definitely need a less tight tinfoil hat, this one is hard on the brain.
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Your choice in the comments.
25 users voted. 4 users abstained.
Source: habr.com