It is a highly automated process. It is also not as highly regulated as other construction projects, as the cable won't kill anybody. There are also no vested interests that want internet connectivity to remain bad in Africa.
Oh yes there are: telco incumbents fight furiously to protect their turf. This is why it's 2022 and it's still illegal (!) to provide video calls over the Internet in the UAE.
The UAE's connectivity isn't actually bad. Latency to most of SEA is quite good (50ms to India, 80ms to Singapore).
But for what I assume to be political reasons latency to Europe is about 20 or 30ms higher then what it could be .
When I was there, I could get sub 100ms latency to France using a Wireguard tunnel to an AWS server in Bahrain, while direct connections were closer to 120-130ms.
Overall though, I found connectivity in the UAE to be absolutely fine by middle eastern standards.
Sure, the connectivity itself is fine, the thing that's pathetic is that the only reason they ban calls is to try to protect Etisalat's long-distance phone revenue and to funnel people into its paid alternatives (are they still charging from Botim?).
This. It is more about end-to-end encryption and the government wanting to have the certs to decrypt stuff if necessary.
I was in Dubai twice earlier this year, and among other people I met with Dr Marwan Alzarouni, who helped create the first certificate authority in UAE many years ago. And their group have now released an app that has all your info and you choose what verified credentials to present.
Monaco and Dubai are “police states” if you will, with cameras everywhere and end to end encryption technically illegal. Many people (tourists, businessmen) seem to like that.
Sorry, what were the impacts other than a few weeks of construction noise? The cable is buried under the beach and the seafloor until you get half a mile offshore. According to the link, they left some drilling equipment 60 feet underground, and that's a "disaster"?
This site seems to be dedicated to opposing any sort of development along the Oregon coast, so I guess it's not surprising they didn't like this.
The independent analysis [1] concluded that "there are currently no adverse environmental, scenic, recreational, or economic impacts resulting from the drill break or presence of Remaining Materials 50 to 70 feet below the sea floor, nor is there a reasonably conceived scenario (e.g. earthquake, tsunami, long-term coastal erosion) that would expose the Remaining Materials to the surrounding environment and result in future impacts."
The drilling fluid is in a borehole ~60 feet underground, and has hardened into a solid (as it's designed to do when not under the mechanical stress of drilling). It's mostly water and clay, with a few additives, all of which are below their ecotoxicity threshold concentrations, even at full concentration in the borehole. And if the drilling fluid ever entered the ocean (which it won't), it would be diluted such that "concentrations of the drilling mud additives and their chemical constituents would be orders of magnitude below ecotoxicity threshold concentrations (and therefore non-hazardous to natural resources) and undetectable".
Didn't read the article but from what I understand drilling fluid for environmentally sensitive areas tends to be water with bentonite clay and a small amount of thickener like barium sulfate or calcium carbonate (i.e. seashells) in it.
I wonder if it could be a net positive for the connection point areas.
I'm speculating that areas with undersea cables are often marked as "no anchor" zones due to the risk of damage (in areas where such practices are followed).
So the drop in damage from anchors and extended motor boat presence might eventually outweigh the initial damage from laying the cable.
The idea of net positive is flawed, as multiple local net positives from different disruptions (other than cables) might lead to deterioration of global quality thresholds for sensitive issues, e.g. chains of wetlands required for migratory birds. These global connections are most often unwisely accounted.
I agree. UCLA is building 1 dorm building right now and it's estimated to cost $1.5 billion. Being a Californian real estate project it will no doubt have cost overruns.
This cable would undoubtedly have cost many times that amount had it run along the west coast of the USA rather than Africa. People always forget about currency conversion and purchasing power when having such discussions.
Are you using local talent to lay the cable? I would generally assume you use the same crew and same boats all the way through, who probably dont want to be paid in local currency.
Probably not local talent/currency along the whole route. But if we are comparing to a project off the West Coast of the US where (I think) they'd be required to use a US flagged vessel and American crew, then it still should be far cheaper. And that's before environmental reviews, etc.
There is a cable project currently ongoing for the east coast of the USA, called Confluence-1, to be finished in 2023. I wonder what their budget for that cable is.
To add to this, people would also likely forget that the US west coast is about 1/3 that of Africa’s, so it’ll get you only about as far as Nigeria. Africa is massive!
They would? Growing up we compared continents so it would be the west coast of all of North America from Panama to Alaska as a point of comparison to Africa.
FWIW the SEA-US cable occupies some prime beach town real estate in California and Hawaii and still only cost like $250m. I was looking at the cables that go along the west coast and the ones I checked were even cheaper than that, although they're old enough that inflation could be more of a factor
I was referring to the cost of the materials. If we are talking about labor, sure. Most of the cost I presume isn’t labor though. Materials are imported with a weakened currency.
Google's cash reserves are in USD. Either they are purchasing the materials in USD (so no difference to them), or in the local currency (which works out better when USD is strong). So either way a strong dollar is good for them.
You wrote: <<Google's cash reserves are in USD.>> I tried to search for confirmation of this fact. I cannot find anything. Do you have a source? And, can anyone confirm if you can pay for Google services using non-USD? I assume yes. I cannot believe that Google is selling adverts in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan and not accepting local currency. Also, Google has many, many employees overseas (ex-US), so they need lots of non-USD to pay local employees and expenses (office space, etc.).
