Disappointing that it's only HK, not mainland China. Nobody's going to notice the difference. From the headline, it sounded like FB and Google we getting some kind of toe in the door, but their cable is going to be useless to the Chinese who have their international data throttled for political reasons, not because of a lack of cables.
If the Chinese didn't try to slow down outside Internet traffic coming in massively in order to censor and spy on it, the speeds would likely become much better.
I've been told that this is the primary purpose of the whole thing. It's a back door protectionist tax on foreign Internet services done in such a way as to not trigger taxation provisions in trade deals.
Someone who once specialized in breaking the GFW for NGOs and activist groups, and who worked a lot in China.
Censorship is still a motive, just not the only one and maybe not even the primary one. The GFW is just too porous to be an effective censor, but it does prevent foreign Internet based SaaS from competing in China. It means to compete in China you must be in China where your IP can be easily appropriated since the Chinese state must also have root on your box (or the cloud host).
This cable is most likely for diversification for paths to Asia. There are 11 cables that land in HK, Google is a consortium member on one of them (SJC).
I wonder how this massive new fiber will stimulate the already sizeable undergrowth of VPN and proxy solutions for IP-hungry mainlanders, many of which terminate in Hong Kong.
