Google has announced about its intention to invest in a new undersea cable named – INDIGO. It will connect Australia and Asia through Perth, Sydney and Singapore. The new cable system will have a branch to Jakarta and will serve Google traffic on the route.
Constructed by Alcatel Submarine Networks and set to complete by mid-2019, the new cable will be almost 9,000 km (or 5,600 miles) long. Along side Google, the new cable system will be build in Southeast Aisa by the consortium of AARNet, Indosat Ooredoo, Singtel, SubPartners and Telstra.
The cable will be designed with two fiber pairs and will provide a capacity of about 18 Tbps (terabits per second). The infrastructure will have the option to expand later. According to Google, the bandwidth will allow 8 million simultaneous HD Google Hangout video conference calls for people in the connected regions.
Google has not shared anything specific to how much investment it’s going to make in the project. Tech Crunch, however, reports that the new INDIGO cable, which is evolved from the APX-West cable between Singapore and Perth, was initially supposed to cost around $75 million.
In addition to this new cable, Google has invested in seven submarine cable systems and five of which are in Asia.
