Google is not the type of company that is going to wait around for the federal government or even a considerably more efficient state government if it wants something done. The two graduate students didn’t wait for a search engine, hell, they didn’t wait to graduate before launching the search giant. But the company with its coffers, thousands of engineers and wealth wasn’t going to wait to build a fiber-optic cable direct to Japan, they just wrote a check.
Google wanted direct line, they have a direct line to Japan
Faster, the name given by Google and the Asian telecommunications companies they partnered with to build the fiber-optic cable that is now live. The high, rather highest, speed cable that has ever been built undersea in the Pacific stretches about 5,600 miles from Oregon state to two points in Japan and offers as much as 60 terabits per second. That number is half what was available between Asia and the West Coast of the United States just a few months ago before Google’s went live. While that number is a bit theoretical, it’s still really fast.
The search giant is not playing around and invested accordingly along with China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI, and Singtel. NEC was also enlisted to physically lay the underground cable.
Part of that investment meant that Google would reserve 10 of those theoretical terabits per second for its own data which will not be shared with any of its partners. That will be used to connect Google-owned data centers, which makes a tremendous amount of sense when Google announced that its cloud services will largely be run out of Tokyo beginning later this year according to an announcement that the Alphabet property announced in March.
“The cable utilizes Japanese landing facilities strategically located outside of tsunami zones to help prevent network outages when the region is facing the greatest need,” reads a Google blog post that announced its status as “live” while speaking to the geographic challenges Japan and California face when it comes to earthquakes.
Nothing new for Google, they lay cable
Microsoft and Google announced that they would partner to lay a similar, though more powerful 160 terabit trans-Atlantic undersea cable stretching from Virginia to Spain, in the near future without regards to others that might be interested in the project. Google, with the building of these high-speed cables, will largely be leasing its connections to traditional telecoms that just can’t do it with Google’s acumen, cash or vision. It also show exactly, what (bandwidth) Google needs to continue powering the way we use the Internet while handsomely paying it for simple ads that many no longer even notice.
“We are seeing a very clear trend towards private networks becoming the major users of international submarine cable capacity,” says Jonathan Hjembo, a senior analyst at Telegeography.
It’s really just part of a larger trend which shows what Facebook, Google and others need going forward and each clearly have little interest in using the Internet to ferry data that they can build direct connections to with strategically placed data centers.
60% of trans-ocean cables are now privately owned and that is looking like a low number if you want to have a guess about 2020.
Company’s like Facebook, Microsoft and even Amazon have thrown down the gauntlet with regards to being in control even if it costs them billions in the short-term.
