Google is again joining forces with foreign phone companies to help lay new undersea fibre-optic cables, bringing faster internet speeds to the far corners of the world.
On Tuesday, the website TeleGeography reported that Google has joined a consortium to build an intra-Asia undersea cable called the 'Southeast Asia Japan Cable' (SAJC), to connect Japan, Guam, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Thailand.
Earlier this year, Google joined a group to build an undersea cable linking Japan to the US. The consortium building the new intra-Asia cable has many of the same members as the consortium developed for the Japan-US cable, including Google, Bharti, SingTel, KDDI and Global Transit.
There is already much competition along this southeast Asia route, where several cables have already been planned. As a result, the new intra-Asia SAJC cable probably won't be ready until 2011, TeleGeography analyst Alan Mauldin said in the report.
In addition to helping lay new fibre under the ocean in Asia, Google is also reportedly looking for partners to help it build a new undersea cable to Africa. So far details have been scarce, but the South African website ITWeb reported earlier this month that Google recently met with South African ISP Internet Solutions, Telkom SA, MTN and Vodacom in July.
The site also reported that Google met with two existing project leaders, South Africa's Broadband Infraco, which is trying to build a cable along the western coast of the continent to Europe, and Seacom, building a privately owned system that will run along Africa's eastern coast, connecting Africa to India and Europe.
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Google has been building fibre infrastructure in the US for the last few years. Most of this fibre infrastructure has been used to fuel internal network and datacentre growth. The new undersea cable investments could be an extension of this strategy. However, it may also prove to be a way for Google to push more bandwidth and capacity into regions of the world where it sees the most growth potential for its services.
Google executives have said for a long time that developing markets offer the biggest opportunity for the company, with billions of users poised to use its products and services in the future.
