Google Plans to Expand Huge Undersea Cables to Boost Cloud Business
January 16 2018 - 5:59AM
Dow Jones News
By Drew FitzGerald
Google is expanding its sprawling network of undersea cables to
plug into new regions around the world, in a bid to speed up its
cloud-computing business and catch up to rivals Microsoft Corp. and
Amazon.com Inc.
The search-engine operator has plans to build three new
underwater fiber-optic cables lining ocean areas from the Pacific
to the North Sea, extending its private data network to regions
competitors haven't touched with similar projects.
The cables, expected to be finished in 2019, are designed to
speed the transfer of data and reroute users to servers around the
globe if a region fails or gets overloaded.
Google said the investments could cost hundreds of millions of
dollars but are worth the expense to get a better shot at the
multibillion-dollar cloud-computing market.
"I would prefer not to have to be in the cable-building
consortium business," said Ben Treynor, vice president of Google's
cloud platform, but when the company looked at ways to push its
cloud business past new frontiers like Australia and South America,
"there weren't a lot of great options."
Google parent Alphabet Inc. owns a massive network of
fiber-optic cables and data centers built up over the past decade.
Mr. Treynor said the infrastructure already adds up to the world's
biggest private network, handling roughly 25% of the world's
internet traffic, and helps Google control its data-intensive
software without relying on telecom companies.
The projects would bring the number of subsea cables Google has
helped build to 11 after a decade of nonstop construction. Its
engineers rely on all those conduits to refresh search results,
move video files and serve cloud-computing customers who do
business in different parts of the globe.
That last business line could use a boost. Google is third in
cloud-computing revenue behind Amazon and Microsoft in the race to
win big customers, which run everything from shopping websites to
government databases on the tech giants' computer servers. Billions
of dollars of annual revenue are at stake as corporations move
their information-technology operations to more flexible systems on
the cloud.
Google has teamed up with other firms, including domestic
telephone operators and Facebook Inc., to build its subsea cables.
But it is breaking precedent with its longest, fully private
long-distance cable, which will stretch 6,200 miles from Los
Angeles to Chile, where the company finished a data center in
2015.
"This is, I believe, the largest single pipe into Chile," Mr.
Treynor said of the Curie cable, named after the French scientist
Marie Curie.
The company is planning to share capacity with Facebook on a
planned 4,500-mile cable from the East Coast of the U.S. to
Denmark, with a pit stop in Ireland. The Havfrue line, Danish for
"mermaid," will give the company more bandwidth across the Atlantic
Ocean.
A planned 2,400-mile cable called HK-G, running from Hong Kong
to Guam, will hook up with other cable systems linking Australia,
East Asia and North America.
Google's new cables will help link five new regions for cloud
customers in Montreal, the Netherlands, Los Angeles, Finland and
Hong Kong.
The company's network-driven strategy has gained it some
attention. PayPal Inc. technology chief Sri Shivananda said the
company spent months considering where to move some of its
developer and testing systems before settling on Google in
mid-2017.
Mr. Shivananda said the payments processor was impressed by
Google's consistently fast connections. Transactions that take too
long often make users abandon a purchase entirely, he said.
Some of PayPal's acquired companies, including Braintree and
Venmo, still run partly on Amazon. "We'll be a multi-cloud
environment" for the foreseeable future, Mr. Shivananda said.
--Jack Nicas contributed to this article.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 16, 2018 05:44 ET (10:44 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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