Google announced its undersea cable project that will run from Japan to Australia

Google has recently decided to construct another undersea cable that will run from Japan to Guam and from Guam to Australia. The cable, named JGA, will cover a vast territory of almost 6000 miles and link up with the existing Hong Kong-Singapore-Australia cable to build a ring that covers the Asia-Pacific region. A blog post published on the project mentions, “JGA is being co-built by NEC Corporation and Alcatel Submarine Networks. The JGA-South segment is being developed by a consortium of AARnet, Google, and RTI-C, while the JGA-North Segment is a private cable being developed by RTI-C.”

Vijay Vusirikala, principal engineer at Google, who specializes in undersea cables, said that the sheer scale of Google usage has shaped the decision to manufacture the cable. Moreover, building own cables rather than renting time is more economical and cost-effective. “This is essentially building infrastructure at scale and with scale getting the optimization benefits”, explained Vusirikala.

The decision marks the emergence of a noteworthy project that might be completed by the next year. The cables will be made with high quality glass that can carry 100 terabits of traffic as well as bear the conditions of lying in an ocean bed. Google’s experts’ team is outlining a plan to lay the cable effectively and easily for the cable to have the least amount of latency. Michael Francois from Google’s Global Network Infrastructure team said, “They generally don’t fail once they are put in. Generally when something happens – it could be dropping an anchor on it and breaking through armoring of the cable. If it does break, it needs to be repaired by ship.”