Google has announced that it plans to build three new subsea cables as part of an investment drive for its cloud infrastructure.
With the additional news that the it will be adding a further five regions to its network – which, according to the company, already delivers 25 per cent of worldwide internet traffic – the additional cable investment will be essential in continuing to maintain and improve performance.
Regions in the Netherlands and Montreal are set to open this quarter, and then Los Angeles, Finland, and Hong Kong, with the company stating there is still ‘more to come’. This will be followed in 2019 by the implementation of three subsea cables.
Curie (named after Marie Curie) is a private cable connecting Chile to Los Angeles - the first subsea cable to land in Chile in almost 20 years, according to Google. Designed, deployed and launched for the company by TE SubCom, the four fibre-pair system will span more than 10,000km, linking Los Angeles, California to Valparaiso, Chile, and will include a branching unit for future connectivity to Panama. Once it has been deployed, Curie will be Chile’s largest single data pipe, serving users and customers across Latin America.
The Hong Kong-Guam Cable system (HK-G), for which Google is partnering with RTI-C and NEC, is a consortium cable, interconnecting major subsea communication hubs in Asia. Together with the planned Indigo system, the new cable will create increase the organisation’s resilience in the Pacific (see Google investsin Indigo undersea cable in Southeast Asia).
Havfrue is a consortium cable built by TE SubCom and in conjunction with Facebook, Aqua Comms and Bulk Infrastructure. It will connect the US to Denmark and Ireland (see TE SubCom wins North Atlantic cable contract).
Writing in a recent blog, Ben Sloss Traynor, vice president, engineering at Google said: ‘Simply put, it wouldn’t be possible to deliver products like Machine Learning Engine, Spanner, BigQuery and other Google Cloud Platform and G Suite services at the quality of service users expect without the Google network. Our cable systems provide the speed, capacity and reliability Google is known for worldwide, and at Google Cloud, our customers are able to make use of the same network infrastructure that powers Google’s own services. We’re excited about these improvements. We're increasing our commitment to ensure users have the best connections in this increasingly connected world.’
