Google loves investing in cables. The company has now announced that it is setting down a brand new sub-sea cable between Singapore and Australia. The cable will be 5,600 miles long and will extend from Singapore to Perth and Sydney in Australia. There will also be a sub-branch that will make its way to Jakarta, in Indonesia. The cable is being set down by a consortium that includes almost all big names in the cable laying industry including AARNet, Indosat Ooredoo, Singtel, SubPartners and Telsta.
The cable will consist of two fibers. Together, the two will give it a transmission speed of around 18 terabits per second. As huge as that capacity is, it pales in comparison to what cables are capable of today and the kind of demand they have been facing.
For instance, the search engine giant says that this capacity will be enough to power 8 million simultaneous Google Hangout video calls all at once. However, Google and Facebook have a sub-sea cable running between Hong Kong and Los Angeles, that has a capacity of 120 Terabits. What’s more, the tech behemoth will likely be using only some capacity of the 18 Terabits available and the rest will probably be leased out to to others. So the cable probably won’t be carrying 8 million simultaneous hangouts calls anytime soon.
Meanwhile, this marks the seventh time that Google is investing in sub-sea cables. Google is particularly active in these investments considering that they play a tremendous role in easing data transmissions and for a company like Google, data is very well its lifeblood. The company also owns stakes in several huge, data transmitting cable routes across the planet.
What’s more, while most Internet entities are content with leasing space on these wires from those who actually lay them down, Google is among companies that actually put in the effort and the resources to get them laid down themselves. The importance of the fact that Google is again laying down a cable mostly in Asia, shouldn’t be lost as well.
