Australian telecommunications newsletter Communications Day has claimed a world exclusive, with news that Google plans to rollout an undersea communications cable across the Pacific Ocean, with the exact route still to be finalised. We can assume it will probably be something like San Francisco to Sydney via Hawaii.
Here’s an excerpt from Communication Day’s email alert:
The Unity cable has been under development for several months, with a group of carriers and Google meeting for high-level talks on the plan in Sydney last week.
Google would not strictly confirm or deny the existence of the Unity plan today, with spokesman Barry Schnitt telling our North American correspondent Patrick Neighly that “Additional infrastructure for the Internet is good for users and there are a number of proposals to add a Pacific submarine cable. We’re not commenting on any of these plans.”
However, Communications Day understands that Unity would see Google join with other carriers to build a new multi-terabit cable. Google would get access to a fibre pair at build cost handing it a tremendous cost advantage over rivals such as MSN and Yahoo, and also potentially enabling it to peer with Asia ISPs behind their international gateways - considerably improving the affordability of Internet services across Asia Pacific.
What’s scary about this is that Google, by moving into communications infrastructure, has a real chance of dominating not only the Internet application space, but also the Internet communications infrastructure as well! I wouldn’t be surprised if this is an aggressive play to diversify to take on the likes of social networking sites such as Facebook, which have the potential to subvert Google’s dominance in the Internet search and application arena.
Full story now online at http://www.commsday.com/node/186.
