Given Google’s mission–to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful–and the telecom costs and peering fees associated with this goal, it was inevitable that the company would look to secure additional network capacity.

But evidently, Google (GOOG) had other ambitions here as well–like deploying its own 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home Internet service.

“We’re planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States,” Google product managers Minny Ingersoll and James Kelly wrote in a company blog post. “We’ll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.”

Google insists that the purpose of this project is to “experiment and learn” in hope of making Internet access better and faster for everyone. That’s an altruistic goal, but a selfishly altruistic one. By providing Internet speeds of 1Gbps, Google will drive further usage of its various services and the contextual ads it peppers them with. At the same time, the company will humiliate the telcos into improving their own networks and, given Google’s stated focus on “openness and choice,” perhaps even change market dynamics.

But is this plan setting the stage for Google to become a full-fledged network operator? That seems unlikely. Telecom is a low-margin, capital-intensive business. I can’t imagine that it is very attractive to Google, which can’t even be bothered to build out a viable support system for its new Nexus One smartphone business.

The incident comes less than a year after four undersea communications cables were damaged in a single week by what was believed to be a wayward boat anchor. That’s likely the same culprit here.

The incident comes less than a year after four undersea communications cables were damaged in a single week by what was believed to be a wayward boat anchor. That’s likely the same culprit here.

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.”

What caused the disruptions? Finding five accidental failures in a week a bit hard to swallow, conspiracy theorists were quick to claim sabotage. But the cable operators and the International Telecommunication Union insisted the most likely culprit was an errant boat anchor. And their argument seemed to be borne out when an abandoned anchor was discovered near the second cable to be cut.

But now it appears the ITU itself may be finding the errant-anchor theory a bit suspect. With repairs completed on four of the five cables, the ITU has presumably been able to perform a fair bit of analysis on the cables at issue here, and it’s not convinced that it was Mother Nature who damaged them. “We do not want to pre-empt the results of ongoing investigations, but we do not rule out that a deliberate act of sabotage caused the damage to the undersea cables over two weeks ago,” Sami al-Murshed, head of the ITU, told Agence France-Presse. “Some experts doubt the prevailing view that the cables were cut by accident, especially as the cables lie at great depths under the sea and are not passed over by ships.”

Undersea Internet cable damage is hardly unusual, but four five cables severed in one week? Seems a bit odd, doesn’t it? Last Wednesday, two cables in the Mediterranean were cut, disrupting Internet traffic from Egypt to India. On Friday, a third cable was cut, this one in the Persian Gulf, off the coast of the United Arab Emirates. Then a fourth cable, also off the coast of the UAE, has been compromised.

Initially, authorities thought that a wayward ship might have cut the cables with its anchor, but that theory was dismissed by the Egyptian government over the weekend. Turns out there were no ships in the area at the time the cables were severed. “The ministry’s maritime transport committee reviewed footage covering the period of 12 hours before and 12 hours after the cables were cut and no ships sailed the area,” Egypt’s transport ministry explained. “The area is also marked on maps as a no-go zone and it is therefore ruled out that the damage to the cables was caused by ships.”

So what caused it? A submarine? An unseen enemy? The NSA? Or something far more sinister … Architeuthis TCP/IP?

UPDATE Feb. 5: Looks like the fourth cable may not have been cut, but taken offline.

UPDATE Feb. 5: Khaleej Times reports that a fifth cable has been damaged.