FEATURE
LATENCY AT THE DIGITAL EDGE: Enabling Subsea Cable Systems to Terminate Inside Multi-Tenant Data Centers
BY ALEX VAXMONSKY
T
oday, more data is being produced and processed than ever before. According to the new 2018 Global Digital suite of reports, well over half of the world’s population is now online, of which nearly a quarter of a billion new users came online for the first time in 2017. Data proliferation continues to rise exponentially, thanks to the recent tech boom. Gartner estimates that IoT (Internet of Things) endpoints will reach an installed base of 25.1 billion units by 2021. These IoT systems are transforming the digital world with advanced, distributed capabilities and pushing edge computing forward as the necessary architecture, as new services will have to be staged closer to the end-user to deliver ultra-low latency. All these advancements are putting pressure on the path that data takes to get from source to end users and applications. 99% of the world’s international telecommunications is carried over submarine cables. Anything that is not cached in a local data center is
going through submarine cables at some point. The miles and miles of fiber optic cables that form the backbone of international data exchange have existed for longer than most of us can imagine. It was in 1858 that the first trans-Atlantic cable connected London with the new world, via Newfoundland. The cable allowed for 143 words to be transmitted in just 10 hours, instead of the 12 days that the one-way dispatch previously took. Contrast this with the 1890s when Morse code began to be used extensively for early radio communication, before it was possible to transmit voice. Undersea cables have become an even more valuable commodity in the past twenty years. Without these subsea cables, business processes would not be able to flow, and the world’s economies would suffer. More cable is being laid each year to meet the growing demand of bandwidth. According to the sixth issue of the Submarine Telecoms Industry report, over the last five years, the
Without subsea cables, business processes would not be able to flow, and the world’s economies would suffer.
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SUBMARINE TELECOMS MAGAZINE