Google has announced plans to commission three new undersea cables and add five regions to its cloud network in a bid to further expand its infrastructure and provide faster and more reliable connectivity for internet users. The company revealed in a blog post that the Netherlands and Montreal cloud regions will open in the first quarter of 2018, followed by Los Angeles, Finland and Hong Kong. It will then team up with TE SubCom, NEC Corp and RTI-C in 2019 to roll out submarine cables connecting Chile to Los Angeles, Denmark and Ireland to the US, and Hong Kong to Guam.
The Chile to LA cable, dubbed Curie, will be the company’s first private intercontinental cable as well as the first subsea cable to land in Chile in almost 20 years. Once deployed, Curie will be Chile’s largest single data pipe, serving Google users and customers across Latin America. TE SubCom added that the four fibre-pair system will span over 10,000 km and will include a branching unit for future connectivity to Panama.
The cable system connecting the US to Denmark and Ireland will be called Havfrue (Danish for “mermaid”) and will be built in a consortium with Facebook, Aqua Comms and Bulk Infrastructure. The marine route survey is already underway and the TE SubCom-built cable is expected to come online by the end of 2019.
Finally, the company is working on the Hong Kong-Guam (HK-G) cable, another consortium system, with RTI-C and NEC. The aim is to create multiple paths to Australia, increasing the company’s resilience in the Pacific as well as to major hubs in Asia and the new Hong Kong region.
Google said it has direct investment in 11 cables, including those planned or under construction, and has invested USD 30 billion in infrastructure over the past three years. Its cloud network already has over 100 points of presence and over 7,500 edge caching nodes.
