January 19, 2018

Google’s data center expansion to be supported by self-built, undersea cables

Google seeks to gain total control over design, technical and directional aspects of cables to resolve capacity and latency issues.

Telecom giant

Tech giants Google have announced that their data center expansion, poised for 2018, in the regions of Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Finland, Hong Kong and The Netherlands, will be supported with undersea telecommunication cables, built by themselves. They further added that they plan to build these cables, in a bid to grasp complete control of the design and technical elements, so that they can manage capacity and latency problems faced by customers in those regions.

Google say that like other data center and cloud service companies, they have split their data centers into regions called zones which accommodate two to three data centers to maintain business continuity. They added that they will be building their own telecommunication cable named ‘Curie’ which will connect Los Angeles to Chile. Google will commission telecom providers TE SubCom and RTI-C to build Havfrue cable-connecting the U.S to Denmark through Ireland & HK-G cable-connecting Hong Kong to Guam respectively.

With this plan, Google claims to now have a start-to-end solution for their customers. Explaining this, Ben Treynor, Vice President of Google’s cloud platform, said:

While we haven’t hastened the speed of light, we have built a superior cloud network as a result of the well-provisioned direct paths between our cloud and end-users.

Google seeks to further compete with the likes of Microsoft and Amazon in a bid to grab a greater share of the internet. Emphasizing this, Treynor added:

Together, these investments further improve our network—the world’s largest—which by some accounts delivers 25% of worldwide internet traffic.