KEY POINTS:
In the lobby of Google's Silicon Valley-based headquarters there's an image displayed on a large flat-screen TV that illustrates the great strength but also vulnerability of the internet giant's business.
A Google Earth version of the planet floats in space with coloured, dotted lines shooting out into the darkness. The lines represent internet searches on the Google search engine, each dot heading skyward the equivalent of a thousand searches. Most dots are red to show searches in English, but spin the globe around and there are shades of blue, yellow, green - every colour of the rainbow.
Google has truly global appeal, which is great for business, but it is also dependent on the companies that own the telecommunications cables linking the continents and Google's servers to its hundreds of millions of users. That becomes an element of concern for Google as its services come to represent a sizeable percentage of total global internet traffic.
Charts showing the major undersea fibre optic cable networks linking points around the world are fascinating to study because they show up the world's priorities. The north Atlantic's floor is littered with cables, linking the US and Europe.
The cables were laid in the glory days of companies like Global Crossing that went bankrupt after the dotcom bubble burst but left a glut of bandwidth behind to be sold below cost which allowed the software and IT services outsourcing market and globalisation to flourish.
US companies found they could cheaply shift large amounts of raw data to India via Europe, have programmers in Bangalore and Mumbai work on it and send it back, via the same fibre optic route.
The Mediterranean is also thick with cables trailing off into central and Eastern Europe, Russia and down into Central Asia. Less well connected are the islands of Southeast Asia and Indonesia and in our part of the world just a single cable, the Southern Cross Cable, links us with Australia and the US. A scattering of lines dart between Asia and North America but surprisingly few given the importance of China to the world economy.
It's that Pacific expanse that Google is looking to cross. Reports are that it may build its own pan-Pacific cable or buy "dark fibre" from Flag Telecom which it can light up to make the trans-Pacific fibre connection.
Google's rumoured move makes sense given its recent indications that it's interested in bidding in the upcoming round of radio spectrum auctions in the US. Google wants to throw off the tight lock US mobile operators have on the content their customers access on their mobile handsets.
Access to the internet over undersea cables has generally been more democratic, but that could change given the exponential rise in data capacity requirements of the new internet. With its own fibre link, dubbed the Unity Cable, Google can ensure it has sufficient capacity to link key points on its network.
It has also bought considerable amounts of fibre capacity to link data centres all over the US that hold thousands of its servers. Google's play is really an insurance policy against a shortage of capacity on desirable fibre routes in the near future and for a company with a US$175 billion ($235.5 billion) market capitalisation, is more than affordable.
New Zealand's broadband situation is a good example of the constraints that having limited options in terms of international connectivity can impose. Flat-rate broadband plans that offer speeds as fast as the network will allow (I can hear you spluttering as you read this) and unlimited data downloads were slow to be introduced in New Zealand. Upload speeds on many broadband packages are still pathetically slow.
The Southern Cross Cable Network has been increasing capacity, but it and its shareholders, including Telecom, effectively have a monopoly on undersea, transtasman capacity. One of Google's rumoured points of presence on the new network is Sydney.
It is unlikely the internet company plans to challenge the major telecoms infrastructure players, but having a secure link between the US and Australasia controlled by one of the most dominant internet companies in the world is certainly a good thing for internet users and particularly Google users, in our neck of the woods.
