While it appears that Google will not be getting into the cell-phone business, the search giant announced Tuesday it is taking a different route. Most observers believe Google wasn’t the winning bidder in the Federal Communications Commission’s 700MHz wireless spectrum auction. So rather than controlling the airwaves, Google has joined with five telecommunications companies to build a submarine fiber-optic cable to connect the U.S. and Japan.
Google’s partners in the new $300 million Unity cable are Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI, Pacnet and Singapore Telecommunications. The cable will run 6,200 miles from Chikura, off the coast near Tokyo, to Los Angeles and other West Coast centers.
“The Unity cable system allows the members of the consortium to provide the increased capacity needed as more applications and services migrate online,” said Jayne Stowell, a spokesperson for the consortium.
Unity said the cable will provide “much-needed capacity” as growth in Internet traffic skyrockets between Asia and America. It will initially boost transpacific cable capacity by 20 percent and potentially could add 7.68 terabits per second of bandwidth across the Pacific.
It’s unusual for an Internet company to become so involved with infrastructure. “While Google is the first non-telecom company to take an active role in ownership of a submarine cable, it’s not likely that this is the beginning of a new trend,” said Alan Mauldin, research director at the submarine-cable consultancy TeleGeography.
Indeed, Google has a unique reason for investing in infrastructure, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group, in an e-mail. “Google appears to be trying to vertically integrate — my guess is so they eventually can provide a complete Internet/phone/entertainment service which is completely ad-driven,” he wrote.
Such integration would make the company “virtually impossible to displace without disruptive technology and be in the best position to take advantage” of…