By Drew FitzGerald
Building the Internet is back in fashion and it is tech giants
like Google Inc., Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp. that are doing
the heavy lifting.
New bandwidth is being added at a fast clip, expanding 44% last
year from 2013, a new report by market researcher TeleGeography
said. In fact, the amount of capacity -- about 65 terabits per
second of new network bandwidth - that came online in 2014 exceeded
the entire Internet backbone held in 2011, the report said.
Internet connections that link users to a Facebook profile, a
YouTube video or a Microsoft-hosted website eventually give way to
private networks built by those companies. More than half of the
network capacity spanning the Atlantic Ocean now belongs to private
networks, TeleGeography said.
Private routes give big technology companies a strategic
advantage and come at a lower cost than paying telecom companies
that have traditionally run the Web for access.
Private network capacity grew at an average 66% a year between
2009 and 2014, compared with a 42% expansion in public network
capacity. Consequently, the share of total bandwidth used by
private networks has grown to 35% from 20%.
Google has been an aggressive builder of network pipes. The
company helped build a trans-Pacific submarine cable finished in
2010 and is in the process of funding another one. The company also
took a one-third stake in another fiber optic cable that will link
the U.S. to Brazil.
"We continue to invest in infrastructure that enables us to
provide better, faster services to our users around the world,"
Google spokeswoman Danielle Aronstam said
Facebook and Microsoft are also investing heavily in the
building blocks of a private global network. The pair helped secure
funding for a new cable called AEConnect between Ireland and the
U.S., according to a person familiar with the matter. A spokeswoman
for Aqua Comms Ltd., the company building the cable, declined to
comment.
Spokeswomen for Facebook and Microsoft also declined to
comment.
Write to Drew FitzGerald at andrew.fitzgerald@wsj.com
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