Underwater Google for $300 Million

Google decided to join the Unity consortium, a joint effort by Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI Corporation, Pacnet, Singtel and the Mountain View. The name of the consortium has a pretty story behind it, explained in the press release announcing Google jumping aboard: it was chosen to signify a new type of consortium, born out of potentially competing systems, to emerge as a system within a system, offering ownership and management of individual fiber pairs. The first project the Mountain View based company will be involved with is building a high–bandwidth sub sea fiber optic cable linking the United States and Japan.

"The Unity cable system allows the members of the consortium to provide the increased capacity needed as more applications and services migrate online, giving users faster and more reliable connectivity," said Unity spokesperson Jayne Stowell.

The Trans-Pacific cable will be 10,000 Km long and it will provide connectivity between Chikura and Los Angeles and some other West Coast network points of presence. On the Asian end, it will be connected to another cable system in order to increase connectivity in Asia. Work on laying the cable, and by that the starting point for any future similar plans, will start right away and it is believed that the 7.68 Terrabytes per second fiber optic cable will be finished by the first quarter of 2010.

Francois Stern, Google’s Manager of Network Acquisitions explained the deal on the Official Google blog: "If you're wondering whether we're going into the undersea cable business, the answer is no. We're not competing with telecom providers, but the volume of data we need to move around the world has grown to the point where in some cases we've exceeded the ability traditional players can offer. Our partnership with these companies is just another step in ensuring that we're delivering the best possible experience to people around the world."

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