Google's future private transatlantic submarine cable called "Dunant", a 6,600-kilometre long cable linking the United States and France, is due to come into service by the end of 2020. Orange, a partner of the Californian giant, laid the final section in the Vendée on 13th March.

To link up with the existing terrestrial network, the cable ends in a "landing station" near a beach in the commune of Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez. This underground installation was set up in a bunker more than 10 metres underground, originally built for a NATO cable. The bunker had been dormant since 2016, when it hosted its last cable, "Eurafrica", linking France, Morocco and Portugal. Similar work will soon take place at the other end of the cable, i.e. at Virginia Beach in Virginia.

As the first cable between the United States and France in 15 years, Dunant should make it possible to cope with the sharp increase in traffic expected between Google's data centres on either side of the Atlantic.

The fiber pairs will have a capacity of 30 Tbps each, compared with 3.2 Tbps offered by the previous transatlantic cable, which has been operational since 2001. Orange will benefit from two fiber pairs.

In addition, at the end of 2019, Google inaugurated a first cable, called "Curie", between the United States and Chile. A third, "Equiano", is planned between Portugal and South Africa.

 Read the article

Source : L'Usine Nouvelle

The dependence on digital and its infrastructures is increasing every day. To ensure their independence, the majors of the sector therefore invest in the network (Internet). Sophy Caulier reveals, in an article in Le Monde Économie on June 24, the battle that is being played out between the various players on this gigantic network.

Composed of three main elements: data centres, networks and interconnection points, the Internet is indeed a physical network. The cumulative length of the submarine cables is thirty times around the Earth, or 1.2 million kilometres. However, even though this infrastructure was built to be resilient, it is on the verge of overdose. For information, Netflix occupied one third of the bandwidth in the United States during peak hours in 2016. Another example: in 2018, companies are increasingly storing their data on the cloud with more than 20% growth for the French market. But the risk of overloading the network does not really worry.

The main threat is actually the breakage of submarine or land cables that can cause an Internet outage for several days. This was the case at the beginning of the year in about ten countries on the west coast of Africa. The infrastructure therefore remains fragile despite the redundancy of cables. Companies like OVH, InterCloud or Colt choose to build their own network to protect themselves but also to reduce costs and guarantee quality services to their customers.

GAFAM, which has had data centres for a long time, is also investing heavily in cables. "They deploy their own cables to interconnect their data centers on all continents without going through telecom operators. The challenge for these actors is to set the costs. In other words, they'd rather own than rent! "says Jean-Luc Lemmens, director of Idate DigiWorld's Media-Telecom division.

But when it comes to developing countries or certain geographical areas too far from cables, Internet giants deploy networks via satellites, UAVs or balloons. Amazon, Facebook, Virgin or SoftBank also have great satellite ambitions. Nothing seems to be able to stop the almighty GAFAM in their race to control the armature of the Net.

Click here to read an extract of the article (full article if you subscribe to Le Monde).


Source: Le Monde Économie

In the article published in Le Monde last June, Yves Eudes portrays Framasoft, a Lyon-based association determined to shake up the omnipotence of the GAFAM.

Presenting itself as "a gateway to the world of Free", Framasoft offers free Internet services that respect privacy. A strong entity of 8 employees, 35 members and 700 volunteers whose main goal is to promote FOSS through 3 components: free software, free culture and free online services.

In 2001, the association launched its first project; a directory of free software for education. Since then, it has developed more than thirty free services as part of its flagship programme "Degooglisons l'Internet". It offers alternatives to centralized services such as its own search engine (Framabee), its social networks (Framasphere equivalent to Facebook or Framapiaf equivalent to Twitter) or PeerTube, the most recent, a video sharing platform supposed to compete with YouTube.

Pursuing its "Degooglisation" mission, Framasoft has also created the Chatons network - Collective of alternative, transparent, open, neutral and solidarity hosting providers - now composed of 58 members. The aim of this network is to federate local initiatives and to offer an even wider range of free services.

For Pierre-Yves Gosset, president of Framasoft, the priority is to unite beyond the circle of alternative Internet activists in order to mobilize the entire associative fabric. A long fight for this association whose official motto is "The road is long, but the way is free".


To read an extract of the article (full article if you subscribe to Le Monde), click here.
Find out more about Framasoft and Chatons.
 
Source: Le Monde.