Google (GOOG) is considering an investment in a new cable across the Pacific Ocean for its private network to connect data centers in Oregon and Japan, the Wall Street Journal reports citing sources familiar with the matter.
The move comes as big tech companies, banks and research organizations send and receive an increasing amount of traffic across private networks to keep up with demand.
According to the publication, the prospective investment, which when finished would allow Google to control its own portion of the new subsea cable, would be the search giant’s second such investment as back in fiscal 2010 it invested millions of dollars buying a stake in a similar, $300 million subsea cable project.
The report notes that much of Google’s bandwidth is reserved for its internal or private ‘B4’ network that is used to shuttle emails, YouTube videos and other traffic among about a dozen of its data centers. The network carries more traffic than the public-facing one the company uses to transmit search results to the Internet, the Journal reported.
According to one estimate, traffic on private networks owned by big banks, research organisations, Facebook (FB), Amazon (AMZN), Google and other web giants, use 25% of international bandwidth to send and receive information through their private networks. This trend is driving decisions such as Google’s to invest in submarine cables.
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