Google’s Mega Sea Cable

The NBN in Australia has been made controversial and political

The main issue being  we don’t need 100 Megabits, 25 Megabits to the home is all anyone will ever need.

Now, without wanting to get too political about this, that is a bunch of politicians pandering to a particular demographic, an older demographic that doesn’t see the value in the internet.

There is always going to be this talk. I think it was 1908 when a guy from the US patents office recommended the closing of the patents office because, “Everything that could possibly be invented has already been invented”.

More recently, no less that Bill Gates infamously said, “640 Kilobytes of memory is all anyone will ever need”.

The thing is, what we have now as far as the internet is concerned could not have been imagined in 1994.

So it stands to reason that what we will have by 2034 will be equally unimaginable to us now.

With this in mind, Google (who as we know already are a very innovative company) has decided to invest $300 million in an undersea cable between The US and Japan with a speed of 60 Terabytes per seconds.

To non technical people this is hard to comprehend. I can say, “Well a terabyte is one thousand gigabytes” but it doesn’t really make it any clearer to the average person.

Lets put it in terms every one can understand. A blu-ray disc has roughly 50 gigabytes of information on it. Roughly, 10 gigabits is equivalent to 1 gigabyte. If you have a 25 megabit connection, that is going to take you about 5  1/2 hours to download.

A 60 Terabyte connection could download 120 blu-ray discs per SECOND!

As with anything in computing, underestimating the growth of storage or bandwidth requirements is folly. In 1994 a 500 Megabyte hard drive was big. In 2014 a 500 Gigabyte hard drive is average to getting small.  That is a hard drive 1,000 times the capacity of a large hard drive 20 years ago.

By this rationale, what with the emergence of the use of the internet as a gigantic cloud for storing everything, data speeds requirements are going to just climb and climb.

As for the future, If you want to see it, look at what Google is doing. They seem to be at the crest of the wave right now. But if they are knocked off, what then? Well obviously who ever knocks them off their perch.

Google’s undersea cable

Google’s innovative technologies of 2014