[e2e] google-to-google

[Jon Crowcroft]

So google are buying dark fiber. why?

There can only be one reason:
google will stop searching the web, and then indexing it. They will
host all the web on their machines (plenty of space).
(see article in the excellent technical trade press journal the
onion).

So whats the dark fiber for?
Well you link up all the google clusters directly - no routers, just a
full mesh between google.countrycode

Now, if it was me, I would go one step further. A well known result
from Physics #101 is that if you drop a ball down
a frictionless straightline tunnel between any two points
on the surface of a ball, it will take the same time to traverse and
just come to a stop at the other side. For an object of the radius and
mass of Earth, this is around 56 minutes. So we connect all the
google clusters on the earth by straightline tunnels and provide a
_transport_ service  between these points (both undermining airlines,
trains, but not short hall journeys, but certainyl solving global
warming largely). You then run fiber, or even line of sight laser
links down these tunnels too, giving minium RTT (and still no routers,
no DWDM switches, multiplexors or whatever).  You can run quantum
crypto on these links easily too and the key distribution problem goes
away. (although thinking about it, wiretap/lawful intercept at the
center of the earth is probably outside Bush's jurisdiction, (and
certainly outsde his technical jurisprudence).

So there it is - TJ Watson was right. One computer. No wires. no
routers. complete fault tolerance/resilience. cheap, secure, and 
entertaining. (oh and with the google talk, blog, gmail etc, no phone
or tv networks either).

one problem - if there are too many end points, we need to put the
earth from all those holes somewhere, so google needs to buy some
space research outfit (how much is the European Space Agency or
Chinese or russians compared with Nasa or Northrop, these days?).


no wait, one more optimisation: put the google systems at the _center_
rather than round the edges - halves the RTT. and probably could
survive an asteroid impact properly then too.

hmm, could we implement a turing machine in the currents in the
earth's iron core? hmmm...very long term research project (eat your
heart out Geni ...

wait, there's a bug - if we dig out all the earth, then send it into
orbit, the mass alters, and the transit time thru the tunnels goes
up.....oh but it can't be that much...quick back of envelope
calculation, no its ok...phew.

j.