Echo: A Tech Company Consortium Project

The 12 fibe pair Echo subsea cable aptly illustrates how American Digital Giants are increasingly dominating the Pacific subsea telecommunications market. Carrier consortiums have largely controlled the region's connectivity up to now with the last notable project being the Jupiter cable (RFS 2021) connecting Tokyo to Los Angeles. Google's first solo project was the 16 pair Topaz cable RFS 2024 that directly links Tokyo to Vancouver from where the rest of Canada can be served or the traffic sent South to Seattle. Going forward Google and Facebook own and control all the planned major new cables over the next several years connecting the Asia Rim to the US. Amazon and Microsoft are silient minority investors as well in many of them.

Echo is the first cable to seamlessly connect the Singapore telecom hub to the West Coast. Hong Kong and Tokyo were the Pacific Rim's primary telecom hubs up to 2015. But Singapore has seized Hong Kong's telecom crown. This reflects several factors. Likelihood of Chinese government tapping, and suppression of political rights in Hong Kong as well as the US government prohibition against Chinese ownership in cables landing in the United States and the ban on any US cable landing in China. The result is that there are now two kinds of Pacific cables. Firstly, those that serve the intra-Asian market, but don't land in the US like the new ADC and SJC2 systems. Secondly, US cables that connect the key telecom hubs of Singapore and Tokyo to the US. Singapore is where most Asian traffic to the US is handed off to US carriers or the American tech companies. 

Hence it is not surprising that the 50-50 Google/Facebook joint venture is deploying this low latency route. The reason that Google is not going it alone on the project is that it is building cables all across the Pacific. An educated guess would be at least $1.5 billion investments in total. These investments include Echo, the Humboldt submarine cable from Chile to Australia, another cable to connect Perth and Melbourne, a cable from Australia to Christmas Island, two new cables landing in Japan, Guam to Hawaii, and Hawaii to US. The list is highly incomplete.

Echo lands in Singapore, Indonesia, Guam, and Eureka, California. Indonesia is an important country for Google with world's fourth largest population. Its government aspires to make Indonesia a major telecom hub so it is encouraging new cables. Guam plays an extremely important role in Google's network as a traffic switching point. Six new Google cables will eventually land there. Another key factor is that Guam will provide additional power for Echo in addition to the end points. More power equals more throughput. In essence, Google is creating a highly resilient web of Pacific cables to transport traffic to and from the key new hubs of Singapore and Tokyo as well as fledgling hubs of Indonesia and Australia. Guam's strategic importance makes Google fibre pair sales to the US military highly plausible. While this is speculation on my part, it is well known that the Oman-Australia cable lands at a US military base. There is precedent and cables are far greater throughput and are more secure than satellite radio frequencies. 

The cable itself is RFS 2025 with an intitial design capacity of 144 Tbps. By Pacific standards, it is very high capacity. One notable feature of the project is just how far the Digital Giants have taken their do-it-yourself philosophy. In the past Google and Facebook projects often had carrier consortium parters that handled landing right permissions or cable landing station operations. FCC records show that a Google is handling the landing rights in Singapore in partnership with Telstra which is providing the CLS and also the NOC. In turn, a Facebook subsidiary is handling the Guam and California landings. It also owns the California CLS.