New TransPacific Cable Projects:

Sun Sep 23 14:11:01 UTC 2007

> Not to mention that the Taiwan straits earthquake showed a 
> clear lack of physical diversity on a number of important 
> Pacific routes, which I know some companies are laying fiber 
> to address.

Anyone who took the trouble to read the two articles knows
that one of the two cables is a USA-to-China direct cable
that does not hop through Japan. This is really part of a 
larger connectivity story for the People's Republic of China
along with the trans-Russia cable being built by Russia's
railway-backed TTC and China Unicom. 
http://europe.tmcnet.com/news/2007/09/20/2954870.htm
I wouldn't be surprised if this is somehow connected with
GLORIAD as well. In any case, the USA-China direct route is
clearly avoiding the Taiwan Straits weak point.

And the other cable, which Google is involved in, is connecting
the USA and Australia, a country that has always had connectivity
issues, especially pricing issues. This has led to a much higher 
use of web proxies in Australia to reduce international traffic
levels and this may be the key to why, Google, an application
developer and ASP/SaaS operator, is trying to build a cable link
to the major English language market in Asia-Pacific.

Seems to me both builds are adressing diversity issues in different
ways, and if this results in a bandwidth glut to the region, that
may be part of the plan.

--Michael Dillon