20,000 Googleagues go under the sea

GOOGLE AND FIVE other outfits have joined forces to lay a high bandwidth undersea cable that will bridge the Pacific Ocean along a 10,000km path uniting the USA and Nippon. The fibre optic cable - duh-bbed Unity - will connect Los Angeles to Chikura in Nippon, plugging the search engine behemoth directly into its very own gateway to Asia. It’ll also allow Google to peddle its stuff in even grander style to Asian countries.

The Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing technology will provide 960Gbps of bandwidth, per fibre pair, with the possibility of coupling a total of 8 fibre optic pairs (7.68Tbps). The not-so-cheap $300 million cable will increase trans-Pacific bandwidth by an estimated 20 per cent, but a little maths will tell us the full potential of the cable will more than double US-Asian bandwidth.

NEC and Tyco Communications have been chosen to get their feet wet with a Q1-2010 deadline. Google’s (sea)bed partners are Bharti Airtel, SingTel, Pacnet, KDDI Corporation and Global Transit.

If you think that’s a lot of bandwidth, a quick snoop at TeleGeography.com tells us there are three other projects currently in the works to improve trans-Pacific capacity. These are: the Trans-Pacific Express Cable System (initially 1.28Tbps); the Asia-America Gateway Cable System (again 1.28Tbps) and the recently announced Reliance FLAG (2x1.28Tbps).

All of this will overtake current trans-Atlantic connections by a gazillion bits and will let Americans hook up with Asian brides even faster than before. Asian countries will be able to peruse (and ban) Youtube even more frequently. Oh, apparently they want to use it to improve commercial relations and telecom infrastructure too... go figure.

L'Inq

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