Americas Connect: Google's Three New Cables

Google announced today three new cables: Alisios, Canoa, and Olaluz. President Trump will not be happy with the names. Not American enough. Alisios is a Spanish word denoting the trade winds that cross the Carribean and the Equator. This cable will connect the Dominican Republic to Chile via Panamanian landings. So it will include new long haul fiber routes across Panama. Canoa links the Dominican Republic to Bermuda, where both of Google's new Trans-Atlantic cables, SOL and Nuvem, will also land. So similar to the Pacific where Google is landing six cables on Guam to create its own traffic exchange point, Bermuda is becoming another major private switching center for Google traffic. Traffic between Europe and the Caribbean or the West Coast of South America can now bypass the United States, improving resiliency, yet reducing latency. Indeed, traffic between Europe and Australia can now be routed via Chile because Google's Humboldt cable will link Chile and Australia. The Olaluz (word combines the Spanish words for light and wave) cable connects the Dominican Republic to Miami, which means if SOL or Nuvem lose the segment between Bermuda and the US, traffic can still get to Miami and the US. Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.

These projects illustrate the dogged hyperscaler determination to create super-resilient networks. It is quite a contrast from the traditional telco subsea networks like the bunching of cables between New York and London with 9 major cables landing along a ten kilometer wide beach at Bude, UK.

Google is building an impressively resilient network with numerous routing options that reduce latency while improving uptime. No other hyperscaler has built anything like this web of cables that relies heavily on islands as traffic switching centers. Not surprisingly, the governments of these islands welcome the infrastructure investments as well as the publicity. The islands also provide power for the cables to offset voltage drop. This means the cables can achieve higher throughput. Finally, the islands allow Google to clean up optical errors by putting the traffic through OEM conversions. Subsea cable amplifiers are a source of flipped zeros and ones. The islands allow electronics to purge those errors using forward error correction.


Map of Google's Americas Connect Fibre Optic Subsea Cables

Map of Google's SOL and Nuvem Fiber Optic Subsea Cables


Map of Google's subsea fibre optic Humboldt Cable

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