Google's Bosun Cable Update
Google's Bosun cable will connect Christmas Island, located in the East Indian Ocean, to Darwin, Australia, site of a large military base with rotating contingents of Japanese and American soldiers. The project was announced near the end of 2024. At the time it struck me as a bit strange. Google's new cables across the Pacific will do a lot of island hopping. This allows the power to be boosted, the islands can serve as traffic switching centers if they are hosting multiple cables, and complete OEO regeneration can be done. Voltage drops as electricity flows through the copper or aluminum current conductor. So the advantage of powering a cable at intermediate points is clear. It enables higher end-to-end transmission throughput. A key aspect of Google's Pacific projects is better resiliency. The easiest way to do that is a put a small prefabricated modular CLS on an island and land multiple cables there. There Layer 3 switching can divert traffic in case a ca...