Google finally confirmed the rumours of turning to undersea cables and announced that, together with other five associates will start “Unity”, a trans-Pacific undersea fiber-optic cable linking the United States and Japan. The investment will cost approximately not so cheap $300 million and became necessary as the demand and the current capacity of the trans-Pacific cables tent towards an imbalance. With today’s announcement, it appears the Internet giant’s desire for infrastructure investments is growing or should we say hunger for domination :).

Google’s somewhat 20,000 leagues under the sea adventure will be shared with Bharti Airtel, India’s leading integrated telecom service provider, Global Transit, a South Asian network operator, KDDI, a Japanese information and communication company, Pacnet, leading Asian telecom service provider, SingTel, an Asian leading communications group covering areas of Europe, U.S. and Asia Pacific. 

This 10,000-kilometer linear cable system, called Unity (I am not so surprised by that name) has been designed as a five fiber pair cable system, each fiber with a 960Gbps capability, will link Chikura, near Tokyo, to Los Angeles and the West Coast and is expected to meet the new demands in data and Internet traffic.

The cable system is expected to respond to the demand in data and Internet traffic between the two continents and raise the current capacity by 20 percent, according to Google, and potentially add up to 7.68 Tbps of bandwidth. NEC Corporation and Tyco Telecommunications have been chosen for constructing and installing the cable system, which is set to become available in the first quarter of 2010.

Internet service to millions of people across Asia was disrupted in December 2006 after a 7.1-magnitude earthquake that hit Taiwan disturbed several massive offshore submarine cables that link Asian countries with the US and beyond.

Industry observers said the incident showed that the region’s cable network is too fragile and overly reliant on connections to the United States. Dylan Tan, SingTel’s corporate communications manager, said the main purpose of the new cable is to expand capacity between Japan and the US, while adding to diversity. Though not mentioned but its route will avoid "certain hotspots" on the ocean floor.

So this “Unity” will work as Google’s own gateway to Asia, which will allow the search engine behemoth to flow its stuffs with style :), well off course apart from the selfless act of solving bandwidth needs for those in Asia.