They are basically bandwidth hogs.”

–Alan Mauldin, research director with Washington-based research firm TeleGeography, comments on Google’s capacity requirements.

If your corporate mission is to organize the world’s ever-increasing mass of digital information and make it universally accessible and useful, sooner or later the telecom costs and peering fees associated with the transmission of that information are going to get, you know, quite large. So large, in fact, that it may make sense to build out your own network.

Which is why for the past few years, we’ve been hearing rumblings about Google (GOOG) leasing hundreds of thousands of square feet of carrier hotel space, buying up dark fiber and mulling the purchase of hundreds of millions of dollars in DWDM and Ethernet-based telecom equipment.

It’s clear that Google has a big appetite for network capacity, but apparently it’s quite a bit larger than previously thought–undersea-cable large. This morning Google revealed that it had joined a six-company consortium to build out a trans-Pacific multi-terabit undersea cable. The project is called Unity and is scheduled for service launch in 2010.

“As more and more people conduct online searches and interact with applications like Gmail, Google Earth and YouTube, we’ve had to think outside the box to create a more scalable, affordable and easy-to-manage network that meets our users’ needs worldwide,” Google’s Manager of Network Acquisitions Francois Sterin wrote in a post to the company blog. “One of the biggest challenges we face is staying ahead of our broadband capacity needs, especially across Asia. One of the ways we are addressing this is by working with five other international companies to create a consortium. Collectively we just signed an agreement to build a new high-bandwidth subsea cable system linking the U.S. and Japan (more detail in the press release). This cable system, named Unity, will address increasing broadband demand by providing more capacity to sustain the unprecedented growth in data and Internet traffic between Asia and the U.S. Our participation in building Unity ultimately helps provide our users with faster and more reliable connectivity.”

And Google itself with an easy means of becoming a full-fledged network operator, if it so chooses, right? Sterin says no. “If you’re wondering whether we’re going into the undersea cable business, the answer is no,” he wrote. “We’re not competing with telecom providers, but the volume of data we need to move around the world has grown to the point where in some cases we’ve exceeded the ability traditional players can offer.”

Google declined to comment on the plan and did not confirm that it has hired the sort of submarine cable specialists that might work on it. “It should come as no surprise that Google is looking for qualified people to help secure additional network capacity,” said spokesman Barry Schnitt. “In some parts of the world, these people will work with submarine cables because there is a lot of ocean out there. … Additional infrastructure for the Internet is good for users, and there are a number of proposals to add a Pacific submarine cable. We’re not commenting on any of these plans.”

They are basically bandwidth hogs.”

–Alan Mauldin, research director with Washington-based research firm TeleGeography, comments on Google’s capacity requirements.

If your corporate mission is to organize the world’s ever-increasing mass of digital information and make it universally accessible and useful, sooner or later the telecom costs and peering fees associated with the transmission of that information are going to get, you know, quite large. So large, in fact, that it may make sense to build out your own network.

Which is why for the past few years, we’ve been hearing rumblings about Google (GOOG) leasing hundreds of thousands of square feet of carrier hotel space, buying up dark fiber and mulling the purchase of hundreds of millions of dollars in DWDM and Ethernet-based telecom equipment.

It’s clear that Google has a big appetite for network capacity, but apparently it’s quite a bit larger than previously thought–undersea-cable large. This morning Google revealed that it had joined a six-company consortium to build out a trans-Pacific multi-terabit undersea cable. The project is called Unity and is scheduled for service launch in 2010.

“As more and more people conduct online searches and interact with applications like Gmail, Google Earth and YouTube, we’ve had to think outside the box to create a more scalable, affordable and easy-to-manage network that meets our users’ needs worldwide,” Google’s Manager of Network Acquisitions Francois Sterin wrote in a post to the company blog. “One of the biggest challenges we face is staying ahead of our broadband capacity needs, especially across Asia. One of the ways we are addressing this is by working with five other international companies to create a consortium. Collectively we just signed an agreement to build a new high-bandwidth subsea cable system linking the U.S. and Japan (more detail in the press release). This cable system, named Unity, will address increasing broadband demand by providing more capacity to sustain the unprecedented growth in data and Internet traffic between Asia and the U.S. Our participation in building Unity ultimately helps provide our users with faster and more reliable connectivity.”

And Google itself with an easy means of becoming a full-fledged network operator, if it so chooses, right? Sterin says no. “If you’re wondering whether we’re going into the undersea cable business, the answer is no,” he wrote. “We’re not competing with telecom providers, but the volume of data we need to move around the world has grown to the point where in some cases we’ve exceeded the ability traditional players can offer.”

Google declined to comment on the plan and did not confirm that it has hired the sort of submarine cable specialists that might work on it. “It should come as no surprise that Google is looking for qualified people to help secure additional network capacity,” said spokesman Barry Schnitt. “In some parts of the world, these people will work with submarine cables because there is a lot of ocean out there. … Additional infrastructure for the Internet is good for users, and there are a number of proposals to add a Pacific submarine cable. We’re not commenting on any of these plans.”

Like any network switch, the Nexus 7000 controls and directs the flow of data between connected computers. But unlike any network switch, it can transfer data at 15 terabits per second, which–depending on whatever silly illustrative metric you prefer–is fast enough to either:

• copy all the searchable Web in less than eight minutes;
• download Wikipedia’s database in 10 milliseconds;
• download 90,000 Netflix movies in less than 40 seconds;
• run 5 million concurrent high-quality videoconferences between New York and San Francisco;
• or send a two-megapixel digital photograph of CEO John Chambers to every human being on earth in 28 minutes.

The company claims it can, anyway. “It isn’t often you get to do a clean-sheet design of a system, and that is what we have done over the past four years,” Doug Gourlay, senior director of marketing in the Data Center Solutions unit at Cisco, told SearchDataCenter.com. “The Nexus series is analogous to the Toyota creating the Prius; we have created a new class of data-center switching. We made Ethernet lossless.”

Neat.

For Cisco, which is pushing to increase its presence in the data center and virtualization markets, the Nexus 7000 could be a big winner. “If it works, Cisco would mark off a hugely strategic niche for itself, as a kind of king of virtualization,” Peter Burrows writes in BusinessWeek. “That’s the name of a technology that’s risen to prominence in recent years within pockets of the data center. VMWare, for example, has become corporate tech’s new darling, thanks to software that lets companies spread work among all of their available servers, rather than have them sit idle waiting for their particular job to be called. In storage, gear from companies like Brocade plays a similar role. But until now, no company has figured out a way to easily coordinate these various pools of virtualized gear.”

The new aluminum-clad MacBook Air, which I’ve been testing for several days, is billed as the world’s thinnest notebook computer. Its thickest point measures just three-quarters of an inch, which is slimmer than the thinnest point on some other subnotebooks. And it employs some innovative software features, such as fingertip gestures for its touchpad that are similar to those on Apple’s iPhone.

Apple refused to make the most common compromise computer makers employ to create their littlest laptops. Other subnotebooks — a category generally defined as weighing three pounds or less — have screens of just 10 to 12 inches and compressed keyboards. The three-pound MacBook Air, by contrast, features a 13.3-inch display and a full-size keyboard.

It’s impossible to convey in words just how pleasing and surprising this computer feels in the hand. It’s so svelte when closed that it’s a real shock to discover the big screen and keyboard inside.

But there’s a price for this laptop’s daring design: Apple had to give up some features road warriors consider standard in a subnotebook, and certain of these omissions are radical. Chief among them is the lack of a removable battery. So, while the MacBook Air will be a perfect choice for some travelers, I can’t recommend it for all. It really depends on your style of working on the road and what features you value most.

The MacBook Air, which will be available next week, costs $1,800 with an 80-gigabyte hard drive and a generous two gigabytes of memory. A second model, with a faster, cutting-edge, 64-gigabyte, solid-state drive and a slightly speedier processor, costs a whopping $3,100. The $1,800 price for the main model isn’t unusual in subnotebooks, which can easily top $2,000, although some competitors cost less.

In my tests, the MacBook Air’s screen and keyboard were a pleasure to use. The machine felt speedy, even with multiple programs running. And the laptop has the same Leopard operating system, superior built-in software, and paucity of viruses and spyware that I believe generally give the Mac an edge. I was able to install and run Windows XP using the third-party Parallels software.

But then there are those trade-offs. The sealed-in battery means you can’t carry a spare in case you run out of juice, and you have to bring it to a dealer when you need a new one. There’s no built-in DVD drive. The thin case can’t accommodate a larger internal hard disk. And the machine omits many common ports and connectors.

The MacBook Air

There’s no Ethernet jack for wired broadband Internet connections and no dedicated slot for the most common types of external cellphone modems. That means that out of the box, the MacBook Air has only one way to get on the Internet — through its fast, built-in Wi-Fi connection. If you’re out of Wi-Fi range, you’re out of luck, unless you buy an optional, $30 add-on Ethernet connector or a cellphone modem that connects via USB.

In fact, the MacBook Air has only three connectors: a headphone jack, a single USB port and a port for connecting an external monitor.

That single USB port is a problem, because so many peripherals use USB. You can buy a tiny, cheap USB hub that adds three more ports, but that’s yet another item to carry.

The lack of a DVD drive is partly solved by some clever software Apple included that lets you “borrow” the DVD drive on any other Mac or Windows PC on your network, so you can transfer files or install new software from a CD or DVD. This worked fine in my tests, in which I installed several new programs from CDs on remote computers, but it requires disabling third-party firewalls on Windows machines. It also doesn’t work for installing Windows on your Mac, for watching DVDs, or for playing or importing music. For those tasks, you need an external DVD drive. Apple sells one for $99.

In my standard battery test, where I disable all power-saving features, set the screen brightness at maximum, turn on the Wi-Fi and play an endless loop of music, the MacBook Air’s battery lasted 3 hours, 24 minutes. That means you could likely get 4.5 hours in a normal work pattern, almost the five hours Apple claims.

But the MacBook Air has another downside: its screen height. Because of the larger screen, the lid stands higher when opened than on most other subnotebooks. So it isn’t as usable as some competitors when the seat in front of you in coach on a plane is reclined.

If you value thinness, and a large screen and keyboard in a subnotebook, and don’t watch DVDs on planes or require spare batteries, the MacBook Air might be just the ticket. But if you rely on spare batteries, expect the usual array of ports, or like to play DVDs on planes, this isn’t the computer to buy.

• Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online, free, at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

But how much is too much when it comes to shelling out a little more for convenience, and are you really getting what you pay for? This week, I tested what could be thought of as the ultimate convenience: a box that plugs into your television and Internet connection, letting you download movies whenever you want to watch them. The box costs $399 and doesn’t include the price of movies, which must be rented or purchased for fees as high as $4 or $20 each, respectively.

This box, called Vudu, comes from a Silicon Valley company of the same name (www.vudu.com). Vudu’s biggest strengths are its easy setup, good picture quality and simple user interface, easily navigated using a scroll-wheel remote control.

Vudu costs $399 plus prices to rent or own each movie title.

If the director yelled “Cut!” right here, Vudu would be a box-office smash. But actually using this device is just one problem after another. For starters, though Vudu says it has relationships with the major Hollywood studios, many of the 5,000 titles it offers don’t seem to be popular by mainstream standards. Lots of them are old or obscure. For instance, you won’t find any of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, but how about a 1984 sci-fi/fantasy movie called “The Ice Pirates,” instead?

If you do find a movie that you’d like to watch, you must have a bandwidth speed of at least two megabits per second to download it instantly; millions of broadband homes have slower connections than that. Vudu offers to measure your bandwidth on its home page before you buy it. I tested Vudu for a week on a typical home-type DSL line, and my connection only clocks about 1.5 Mbps, so it took me about 45 minutes to download each movie.

While Vudu’s $399 price tag might take some getting used to, its fees for buying or renting each movie could be harder to swallow after a month’s worth of use: as much as $80 if you bought one top-tier movie a week. Worse, you have to pay in advance. Rather than charging your credit card on a pay-as-you-go basis, Vudu customers must choose a $20, $50 or $100 amount at setup from which movie fees are deducted. When your account hits $0, the amount selected at setup is charged and the debit process begins again.

On top of all this, Vudu relies on a peer-to-peer network system for faster downloading. So, essentially, this company is using your bandwidth to help it save money it would have otherwise spent on its own servers and bandwidth.

I set up Vudu in a snap, plugging it into three things: a wall outlet, the back of a high-definition Sony Bravia television and an Ethernet cord. Wireless connections won’t work with Vudu without a special “bridge” or a power-line adapter. Once Vudu turned on, a friendly voice guided me through setting it up, and I got started in minutes.

Vudu’s home screen is broken down into five menus: Find Movies, New Releases, My Movies, My Wish List and Info & Settings. I used the tiny remote, which fits perfectly in a hand, and rolled through menus using its scroll wheel. This wheel can be pressed down to select something, saving me from glancing down at the buttons. Also, Vudu uses an RF (radio frequency) antenna so you don’t have to point the remote at it.

In Find Movies, I looked through 18 genres, including biography, romance, family and historical. A sorting feature can filter movies by release date, MPAA rating, critics’ rating, studio, availability to rent and availability to own. An on-screen alphabet can be used to type in names of actors, directors or movie titles; the scroll wheel speeds up this process.

Parental controls, which are only accessible with a special code, can be set to block a child from buying or renting movies with certain ratings.

Vudu likes to think of itself as the instant-gratification alternative to running to the video store. But not many people I know still go to Blockbuster for a DVD; instead, they use mail-delivery services like Netflix. Compared with the 85,000 titles offered by Netflix, the selection at Vudu is pretty slim. A more similar comparison might be Amazon’s Unbox for TiVo, which has slightly less than 5,000 movies.

Though I couldn’t find numerous titles, I did discover plenty of movies I’d never heard of. A search for last year’s “Casino Royale” returned Robert DeNiro’s “Casino” from 1995, as well as two Asian films, “Casino Tycoon” and “Casino Tycoon II.” Since I never saw Helen Mirren’s “The Queen,” I tried to find her Oscar-winning performance on Vudu. But the closest I came to royalty were “Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy,” an alternative name for the cheesy 1968 Jane Fonda sci-fi flick, and “Prom Queen,” which fell under the Gay and Lesbian category. I tried to laugh this off by watching Steve Carell’s “Evan Almighty.” But typing “E-V-A…” into a title search only returned “Deliver Us From Eva,” an R-rated 2003 comedy starring LL Cool J.

I searched and found the same three titles on Netflix, though Amazon Unbox only had “Evan Almighty.”

I downloaded two romantic comedies: “Music and Lyrics,” starring Hugh Grant, a $4 rental, and a Diane Keaton movie called “Because I Said So,” which I bought for $20. I also rented “Zodiac,” a suspense movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal, for $4. Movies that you own never expire, but rented flicks must be watched within 30 days and expire 24 hours after you start watching.

In the case of each movie, the original estimates for time to download were daunting; two started out by estimating “Available in a few hours” and one movie’s estimate read “Available in a few days.” But all three finished downloading in about 45 to 50 minutes. Only one movie can download at a time.

While watching movies, the remote’s scroll wheel can be used to fast forward or rewind scenes. Scrolling faster moves you farther ahead or back (the fastest jump moves you 30 minutes); the slowest scroll moves you ahead or back five seconds.

Vudu might cast a spell on users who don’t mind its poor selection and high-bandwidth requirement to deliver instant downloads. But for me, the convenience of Vudu is no convenience at all. As is, its lackluster selection, high prices and slow downloads make it more of a letdown than anything else.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Can you recommend a device that would allow me to surf the Web on a bedroom television connected via Ethernet and to control the device via a wireless keyboard or remote control?

Perhaps the most direct approach would be to buy the MSN TV 2 device from Microsoft that is specifically meant for browsing the Web on a TV from a distance and can be used with Ethernet. It costs $200, plus a monthly fee, comes with a wireless keyboard and remote, and can be ordered at msntv.com.

A second option would be to buy a small computer with a wireless keyboard and hook it up to the bedroom TV instead of to a computer monitor. For instance, I have surfed the Web this way using a tiny $599 Mac Mini computer from Apple, which comes with a wireless remote and accepts almost any wireless keyboard, though it doesn’t come with one. There are numerous Windows computers that could do the same, and many cost less, though most are larger.

Another method would be to use a game console capable of surfing the Web, even if you have no intention of playing games. These are made to work with TV sets, and some can use a wireless keyboard and/or wireless controller to do the job. For instance, the $250 Nintendo Wii game machine has an optional Web-browsing function.

Apple has released a Windows beta version of Safari. Is it any safer to use than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer?

It’s too early to tell, as the Windows version of Safari is still in beta and is very new, to users and hackers alike.

Certainly, operating in Windows will make Safari much more vulnerable to attack than it is on the Macintosh operating system, if only because the writers of malicious software aim their firepower overwhelmingly at Windows. While Internet Explorer is hardly impregnable, it has become safer over the years, and Microsoft certainly has much more experience battling Windows security issues than Apple does. Apple has already issued some security updates for this new version of Safari and will undoubtedly have to keep issuing more to keep ahead of the bad guys.

I am thinking of buying a ThinkPad laptop from Lenovo with AT&T BroadbandConnect. Do I still need to buy some sort of card from AT&T and insert it into the laptop, and must I pay a subscription fee to them?

No, and yes. The laptop likely has the modem for AT&T built in, so you can connect to the Internet via AT&T’s cellular network without buying an external card. However, the service isn’t free. You can’t use it without a subscription, which typically runs $60 a month.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online free of charge at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at mossberg@wsj.com

But there’s a substantial minority of folks who have neither the time, knowledge, nor inclination to do all this downloading and ripping. They don’t want to fool around with any PC software just to hear music. They could just sign up for a subscription service like Rhapsody, which will stream songs to you without requiring any downloading or ripping. But that also has meant using a PC.

The Sonos controller, accessing the Rhapsody music service

Until now. Starting today, there’s a way to get access to Rhapsody’s 2.5 million digital tunes, in any room in your house, straight from the Internet — without even turning on your computer.

This new system is a time/money tradeoff. It saves you time (and what some folks consider a big hassle) in exchange for money: $999 for the basic hardware, plus $10 a month for the music service.

If you’re still reading after digesting those prices, let me add that I’ve been testing this system, which pairs up Rhapsody with the elegant Sonos whole-house music system, and it works very well. It is simple, fast and rewarding.

Both Sonos and Rhapsody were originally designed to work with PCs. Sonos is the most polished consumer hardware system on the market for taking the music that resides on a computer and streaming it to multiple other rooms of your home. It consists of a series of small music-playback boxes that connect to each other over their own wireless network. It normally relies on software you install on the computer. The system is controlled by a gorgeous hand-held remote with an iPod-like wheel and a large, bright color screen that show menus and song information.

Rhapsody, too, is typically dependent on a PC. Users pay a monthly fee to either “stream” music from its collection, or to download it for use on the computer or on a portable device. This is all done using Rhapsody’s software, or a Web browser.

But, with the new Sonos/Rhapsody system, no PC is necessary. You just connect the Sonos hardware to your Internet service, and to either powered speakers or an audio system. Then, simply click on the Rhapsody choice in the menu on the Sonos controller and you can listen to any of Rhapsody’s 2.5 million tracks.

Out of the box, the new Sonos system gives you a 30-day free trial to Rhapsody, without even requiring that you enter a credit card. After that, you must pay $10 a month.

There are other media-streaming devices that can bring Rhapsody to parts of a home far from the computer, and most cost less than Sonos. But all of them, even an earlier implementation using Sonos, require a PC.

Setup of Sonos with Rhapsody was simple. For your $999, you get two small Sonos ZP80 players and one controller. You plug one of the players into your home Internet router so it can fetch the music over the Internet from Rhapsody. The second unit can then be placed in a distant room, with speakers or an audio system, where you wish to hear the music. The two units are linked by their own wireless network, which sets itself up in a few minutes with the press of a couple of buttons.

You can even do this with a single Sonos box connected to the router or to an Ethernet cable running through your walls, if you have one. That would save you some money; a single ZP80 is $349 and the controller is $399, for a total of around $750.

Once you are set up, you just click on “Rhapsody Trial” on the Sonos controller, and you can then select songs via genre, artist and other criteria. Again, there are no files to download. Nothing gets stored on your computer or on the Sonos hardware. The music is just streamed into your home over the Internet.

There are two basic Rhapsody modes. One, called Rhapsody Guide, lets you find and play music, and allows you to “save” the songs or albums to your Rhapsody library. This is a list of songs that the system will fetch from the Rhapsody servers when you want to hear them again. The other, called Rhapsody Radio, consists of over 100 “radio stations” — preprogrammed playlists — based on genres, eras and other criteria. You can also create your own stations.

Although my wife and I aren’t great candidates for this product, because we use iPods and iTunes and have a computer hooked up to our entertainment system, we both got a kick out of the Sonos/Rhapsody package. I found myself scrolling through old rock ‘n’ roll on the treadmill, and she enjoyed a radio station of Broadway show tunes.

There are some drawbacks. Because of complex music-industry policies, a small percentage of songs can’t be streamed, yet they still show up in Rhapsody’s menus, which leads to frustration. And Sonos hasn’t been able to implement a search feature yet, which leaves you doing a lot of scrolling through menus.

But, overall, this is a very good digital-music alternative for people with a roomy budget and a yen for simplicity.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at mossberg@wsj.com