[Infowarrior] - Has Google Plans to Lay a Pacific Cable?

[Richard Forno]

Has Google Plans to Lay a Pacific Cable?

By Saul Hansell

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/21/google-plans-undersea-pacific-cable
/index.html?hp

Google may be the ultimate do-it-yourself company. From the start, Google¹s
sense of its own engineering superiority, combined with a tightwad
sensibility, led it to build its own servers. It writes is own operating
systems.

It is now threatening to start its own wireless carrier and it is getting
ready to hire ships that will lay a data communications cable across the
Pacific, according to a report from Communications Day, an Australian trade
news service.

Google would plan to be part of a project called Unity that would also
include several telecommunications companies, that hopes to have a cable in
service by 2009, the publication wrote. It would own a dedicated portion of
the multi-terabit cable, giving it a significant cost advantage for
trans-Pacific data transmission over rival Internet companies.

Barry Schnitt, a Google spokesman, didn¹t confirm the plan, but did tell the
publication the company is interested in the area, saying, ³Additional
infrastructure for the Internet is good for users and there are a number of
proposals to add a Pacific submarine cable. We¹re not commenting on any of
these plans.² Communications Day also noted that Google has advertised to
hire people who would ³be involved in new projects or investments in cable
systems that Google may contemplate to extend or grow its backbone.²

Google has long been buying up data communications capacity. Its search
engine works by making copies of nearly every page of the Internet in its
own data centers, requiring that it move no small amount of data around the
world on a regular basis. And its new plans to deliver applications over the
Internet will use even more bandwidth.

Dave Burstein, the editor of DSLPrime, who tipped me off to the CommDay
report, explained even though there is a lot of unused fiber capacity across
the Pacific, there are few players, and prices are seen as unusually high.
He adds that there is a glut of cable laying ships, so the cost of building
a new link to Asia has come down.

This new move puts Google in competition again with Verizon, which has
fought Google¹s approach to the new wireless spectrum auction in the United
States. Verizon is part of a group of Asian Carriers that is building a $500
million cable between the United States and China.