Google joins $300m Unity cable project

Google announced today that it plans to join five other international companies in building an additional undersea cable between the US and Japan. The need for the cable itself is unsurprising, given that trans-Pacific bandwidth needs grew by 63.7 percent between 2002 and 2007, but the fact that Google is joining the consortium of Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI Corporation, Pacnet, and SingTel is unusual. Google is insisting, however, that this new move does not signal a change in focus for the company.

According to Google Network acquisitions manager Francois Sterlin, "If you're wondering whether we're going into the undersea cable business, the answer is no," Sterlin wrote in the Official Google Blog. "We're not competing with telecom providers, but the volume of data we need to move around the world has grown to the point where in some cases we've exceeded the ability traditional players can offer."

Once completed, the newly-minted "Unity" five-fiber-pair cable will be capable of carrying up to 960Gbps per pair, or 4800Gbps across the entire cable. That amount of bandwidth alone will increase total data transfer capacity between the US and Asia by around 20 percent, but Unity is designed for expansion. Although it will initially offer five fiber pairs, the line can be expanded up to eight fiber pairs, for a total bandwidth of 7.68Tbps—unless, of course, someone decides to cut the cable in an attempt to stymie US-Asia communications. In that case, having more lines running to and from Asia provides more redundancy in case of failure, naturally caused or not.

Cost estimates for the 6,000-mile (10,000-km) cable from Chikura, Japan to Los Angeles and what Google refers to as other "network points of presence," put the total expense at around $300 million. As one partner out of six, however, Google's total cost expenditure on the effort is relatively small (by Google terms, anyway), and the payoff going forward could be huge.

While Google probably doesn't have any plans to compete with the telecom industry, owning a piece of the cable gives it a say in how that cables assets are deployed and how/when bandwidth capacity is upgraded. Google, like most tech companies, has big plans for the Asian market, and owning a share in the cables that make that market more accessible is a logical step for the company to take.

More on the Google Official Blog...