Google and Facebook will build a new submarine cable to connect Japan and Southeast Asia in 2024
On August
16, Google and Facebook jointly announced that they will participate in the
development of a new submarine cable system in 2024 to improve Internet
connectivity in the Asia-Pacific region.
On August
16, Google and Facebook jointly announced that they will participate in the
development of a new submarine cable system in 2024 to improve Internet
connectivity in the Asia-Pacific region.
Facebook
said that this infrastructure project called "Apricot" will connect
Japan, Singapore, Taiwan Province of China, Guam, the Philippines and Indonesia
to help meet people's growing demand for broadband access and 5G wireless
connections. In March of this year, the company announced two trans-Pacific
submarine cables Bifrost and Echo connecting Singapore and the west coast of
the United States. Google participated in the construction of the latter.
Google
stated in a blog post that Echo and Apricot are two complementary underwater
systems that will increase the resilience of Google Cloud and other digital
services of the company. According to Facebook, the initial design capacity of
this new optical fiber link across the Asia-Pacific region exceeds 190Tbps.
At present,
the two Silicon Valley giants are investing in the construction of Internet
infrastructure in areas where they believe the growth potential is greatest.
Google also announced a $10 billion investment plan last year to help India
advance its digitalization process in the next 5 to 7 years.
In recent
years, Google has participated in the construction of a number of submarine
optical cables. Google is expanding its huge global submarine cable network and
expanding to new regions to accelerate the development of its cloud computing
business and catch up with rivals Microsoft and Amazon.