NY ranks #1 in Internet b/w

Fri Nov 2 17:17:30 UTC 2001

On Fri, 2 Nov 2001, Bram Dov Abramson wrote:

> >that can lay undersea cables yet? A cable from Northern Europe to Japan
> >and the US North West under the North Pole icecap would be great.

> Don't know about the icecaps -- the Middle East will probably have
> more demand than the North Pole for a long long time -- but I think
> FLAG has some bandwidth they'd like to sell you
> (http://www.flagtelecom.com/cable_route.htm).  As might the telcos
> who own SeaMeWe-3 (http://smw3.fcr.fr/SMW/SMWB2.htm)...

Obviously the big advantage of the Mediterranean/Red Sea/Indian Ocean
route is that there are many countries along the way that can benefit from
the cable. But if you want to go from London to Tokyo, it's not quite the
shortest path: the great circle distance is 9600 km, but the FLAG is
nearly three times that at 28000 km. That's even nearly 10000 km more than
a London - New York - San Francisco - Tokyo route. The icecap route
would be only 12000 km.

> >Hm, I'm still waiting to witness a traceroute from Europe to Asia or the
> >Pacific that doesn't go over the US for the first time.

> Yes, but at least you can see traces from S Korea to Japan, say,
> which don't route through Palo Alto.  Region-to-region is harder.

Right. The problem is that it's hard to justify expensive connections to
neighboring countries when:

1. You hardly exchange any traffic with them anyway (for instance, in The
Netherlands it's about 45% domestic, 45% to/over the US and only 10% of
the traffic goes to other European countries)

2. You need (and therefore have) a big pipe to the US anyway that can
absorb this traffic easily

It is extremely annoying when doing the right thing is too expensive.