Google and Facebook are doubling down
on internet infrastructure with a new Pacific
cable
Those data centres need big pipes.
Google is doubling down on its submarine
cable investments in the Pacific ocean, this
time with Facebook’s backing. The two tech
companies announced (Oct. 12) that they are
joining a consortium to build a new transpacific
submarine cable system that will be ready in
2018.
TeleGeography (pdf ). It’s part of a wider trend
of internet infrastructure investment in Asia
outpacing other regions.
The new cable project contributes to another
infrastructure trend, where content-owners like
Google and Facebook increasingly build their own
pathways to their end-users to cater to explosive
demand for bandwidth-intensive content, such
as video streams. The amount of traffic that flows
over these privileged links has grown so great that
it has altered the structure of the internet itself, in
a phenomenon known as the “flattening” of the
internet. Facebook teamed up with Microsoft in
May to build a new transatlantic cable, dubbed
Marea, that connects Bilbao in Spain to Virginia in
the United States.
The project, known as the Pacific Light Cable
Network, will be the largest-capacity transpacific
link when it’s operational, with a bandwidth of
120 terabits per second. It will stretch 12,800km
betweenManhattan Beach, in Los Angeles,
California, and Tseung Kwan O, in Hong Kong.
The planned cable has double the capacity of the
current largest pipe under the Pacific, the FASTER
cable system, which Google also invested in.
Neither Google nor Facebook disclosed the
amount they are investing, but the project costs
$400 million in total, according to the consortium’s
other partners, TE Connectivity and China Soft
Power Technology Holding, when the project was
first announced (pdf ) last November.
Google says it’ll use the capacity from its new
Hong Kong-LA cable to serve its Google Cloud
Platform customers. The new bandwidth could
accommodate 80 million simultaneous highdefinition video calls between the two regions,
the company said in a blog post. Video-heavy
data links are precisely what the world’s biggest
tech companies are preparing for, and why
they’ll continue to own more of the internet’s
infrastructure.
The Pacific is seeing a boom in submarinecable construction. Nearly $1.5 billion has been
committed to submarine routes there between
2016 and 2018, making it among the world’s
most heavily invested regions for new fiber-optic
bandwidth, according to data from research firm
SOURCE: http://qz.com/
9
WN November 2016