Nicholas Deleon talks about the new Unity venture being pursued by Google and a bunch of other companies which will increase the bandwidth capacity across the Pacific. He says:
“One quick thought I had: how often do you, average American Internet user, connect to Asian servers? Unless YouTube or Wikipedia has servers there, it does seem weird to me to suggest all this Trans-Pacific Internet activity when I’m mainly browsing CNN and Drudge and other U.S.-based sites.”
I think Nicholas misses the point.
If this were about the average user using the internet, then the communications companies would be building this pipeline on their own. Google’s problem is that it has so much information. I am betting a lot of that information gets moved around all of its servers globally, whether that is Google pushing data out from their US servers or vice versa. The amount of information they have is increasing exponentially and will continue to grow.. so now they need to work with the telecoms companies to sate their own need for bandwidth. Not just users.