back to article Telstra builds trans-continental land bridge for data

If you want to bring data from Europe or Asia to Australia, routing it to the city of Perth on the nation's west coast is a good idea because the bits spend less time on a submarine cable. For traffic from the USA, routes to Sydney on the east coast are similarly sensible. Once you land that data you then have the chore of …

  1. Winkypop Silver badge
    Meh

    Living in Perth....

    Ya wouldn't know it.

    1. Tim99 Silver badge

      Re: Living in Perth....

      True. but traffic within Oz is often OK. The problem is offshore data. Even the onshore sites tend to load their website pages with advert and framework stuff that has to come from halfway around the planet. So does that mean that our experience in Perth will be further degraded to support Melbourne and Sydney?

      1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

        Re: Living in Perth....

        Don't you use any AdBlocking?

        Why do you need to load adverts from the other side of the planet?

        Haven't they heard of Cloudfare and the like?

        If the webdesigners in Oz are so lazy with their coding then they deserve to be blocked.

        1. Tim99 Silver badge

          Re: Living in Perth....

          @Steve Davies 3

          I use Ghostery, Adblock, ClickToFlash and a custom hosts file. You do know that some adblockers just stop the ad from being displayed? Some of the content is still downloaded.

      2. Winkypop Silver badge
        Joke

        Re: Living in Perth....

        Easterners eh?

        Come over here stealing our meager bandwidth!

  2. Tom 38

    I was going to moan about how slow 40ms is for that distance, then I checked the distance - I forget how big Australia actually is.

    Light travels go at the speed of light (funny that), but bounces all round the fibre instead of going straight, roughly add 50% to the distance to account for that, giving a total travel time of approximately 20ms.

    The distance is probably longer than I've calculated, fibre doesn't travel as the crow flies, but its in the ballpark. For comparison, London to NY is routinely about 60ms and is about 40% further (5500 km vs 3900 km).

    ish.

    1. theblackhand

      If I have my maths right...

      Light through fibre is usually around 2/3 the speed of light in a vacuum - around 204,000 km/s versus 299,792 km/s). That gives a best case of 54ms for a round-trip between London and NYC and 38ms for Sydney to Perth.

      I'd expect NYC-London to be slightly higher (although it is now possible to send traffic without repeaters, I would still expect them to be in use on current circuits and the distance is the direct route versus the actual cable distance) while the Sydney-Perth route is probably accurate based on the distance between the two cities via the A1 highway.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Plus don't forget you'll need repeaters, which themselves will add latency.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I was all like...

    40ms between two places in AUS??? That's pretty crappy.

    Then I googled the distance between Sydney and Perth. Then I was all like, ahhhh that makes sense.

  4. Inquisitor

    Seriously 100Gbps capacity?

    I guess they are deploying 100G technology which means each wavelength on this fiber path provides 100G and usually such a cable would feature dozens of fibers each being lit up with at least 48 wavelenghts. So the total capacity is x fibers * n wavelenghts * 100G and not only 100G.

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