[ad_1]
Google makes billions of its cloud platform. Now he is using these billions to buy the Internet himself – or at least the submarine cables that make up the Internet's main network.
In February, the company announced its intention to further develop the Curie Cable, a new underwater line extending from California to Chile. It will be the first private intercontinental cable ever built by a large non-telecommunications company.
And if you step back and look only at the intracontinental cables, Google has already fully funded a number. This was one of the first companies to build a fully private submarine line.
Google is not alone. The cables traditionally belonged to groups of private companies – mainly telecommunications providers – but the year 2016 was marked by the submarine cable boom. This time, buyers are content providers. Companies like Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon all seem to share Google's aspirations for seabed dominance.
I have seen this trend develop, being myself in the broadband space, and the recent movements are certainly worrying. Ownership of Big Tech on the Internet will have both broad and known implications. It's the same old consumer compromise; more convenience for less control – and less privacy.
We are coming to the next stage of Internet maturity; one where only the big players in place can really win in the media.
Consumers will soon have to decide precisely how much confidence they want to give these companies to create the internet of tomorrow. We must also decide carefully; These are the same companies that have access to an apparently growing share of our privacy.
Wall of the garden
If you want to measure the internet in miles, optical fiber submarine cables are the starting point. These unpretentious cables crisscross the ocean floor around the world, carrying 95 to 99% of international data over fiber optic cable bundles of diameter of a watering hose. In total, more than 700,000 miles of submarine cables are used today.
While older cable manufacturers have exploited cable ownership to sell bandwidth, content providers are intentionally building private cables.
Internet is usually described as a cloud. In fact, this is a series of wet and fragile tubes, and Google is about to have an alarming number. The numbers speak for themselves; Google will hold 10,433 miles of submarine cable worldwide when the Curie cable will be completed later this year.
The total accumulates up to 63,605 miles including the cables that he owns in consortium with Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon. By including these partly owned cables, the company has enough underwater infrastructure to travel the Earth's equator two-and-a-half times (with thousands of kilometers of cable to spare).
The momentum of Google's underwater projects
This submarine cable boom makes more sense if you take into account the traffic growth that has occurred over the last decade.
In the Atlantic and Pacific, content providers accounted for more than half of total demand in 2017. The use of content provider data has exploded from less than 8% to nearly 40% in the last 10 years.
It should be noted here that statistics are significantly lower in Africa and the Middle East, suggesting that hunger in developed countries for video content and cloud applications is driving the trend. This is supported by the overall use of international bandwidth between countries. In 2017, India used only 4 977 Mbps of international bandwidth. The United States used 4,960,388 Mbps in the same year.
The cost of privatized infrastructure
Like the removal of internet neutrality, the privatization of the Internet infrastructure has only reduced prices for consumers. The problem we face is moral: do we want a private Internet? Or do we want to preserve the "Wild West" web we've had so far?
Unfortunately, the question is not as simple as drawing a dividing line between "good" and "bad" network optimizations. Practices such as network networking and declining pricing are essential for business models such as Netflix and AT & T. Nor do they technically break the rules and ultimately provide much better consumer services. .
As we look to the future, we need to start asking ourselves what the Internet really looks like when the content services that already control so much of our attention also control the backbone. Privatized infrastructure can bring untold benefits to consumers in the short term, but is there a cost we are not considering?
Tyler Cooper is Consumer Policy Expert and Publisher at BroadbandNow. He has more than ten years of experience in the computer and networks and wrote since 2015 on broadband issues such as the digital divide, internet neutrality, cybersecurity and the Internet. 39, Internet access.
[ad_2]
Source link