Google has revealed it will add five regions and build three new submarine cables as it expands its infrastructure for cloud customers.
The company, which has invested US$30 billion in infrastructure over the past three years, said its Netherlands and Montreal regions will open in the first quarter of 2018, followed by Los Angeles, Finland, and Hong Kong.
Google plans to commission the three subsea cables in 2019, the internet giant said in a blog post.
The subsea cables include: Curie, a private cable connecting Chile to Los Angeles; Havfrue, a consortium cable connecting the United States to Denmark and Ireland; and Hong Kong-Guam Cable system, a consortium cable interconnecting major subsea communication hubs in Asia.
Subsea cables form the backbone of the internet by carrying more than 90 per cent of the world's data traffic.
The companies setting up the cables include TE SubCom, a unit of NYSE-listed TE Connectivity Ltd, and Tokyo-listed NEC Corp, Google said.
The company said it has direct investment in 11 cables, including those planned or under construction.
In the Pacific, Google said it is working with RTI-C and NEC on the Hong Kong-Guam cable system.
Together with Indigo and other existing subsea systems, Google said that this particular cable creates multiple scalable, diverse paths to Australia, increasing the company's resilience in the Pacific.
As a result, Google customers are expected to experience improved capacity and latency from Australia to major hubs in Asia. It will also increase the company's network capacity at our new Hong Kong region.
“These new investments expand our existing cloud network. The Google network has over 100 points of presence and over 7,500 edge caching nodes. This investment means faster and more reliable connectivity for all our users," Google said.
(Reporting by Munsif Vengattil in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila; with ARN Staff)
