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- Like billions of people around the world,
I use Google products every day.
We all rely on these services
loading and reacting quickly with low latency,
so data often needs to move extremely fast
from one place in the world to another.
And that's not an easy task.
It turns out a big part of the Cloud isn't in the sky.
It takes the form of fiber optic cables like this,
that crisscross the globe,
and Google has one of the most advanced
global networks of fiber optic cables.
To understand how the network operates,
let's begin at a data center.
There, fiber connects individual machines
then expands to connect
to other data centers in the region.
Long haul cables sometimes span mountain ranges
to connect far-flung regions.
To create connections between continents,
our subsea cables are carefully laid
on the ocean floor.
Let's take Topaz, one of our newest subsea cables.
It's the only cable in existence
to directly connect Canada to Asia.
Its planning started over five years ago.
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Predicting capacity and building a cable isn't easy.
I got to meet the teams that made it happen.
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- What we do is, we try to look at
our current requirements from the business
and then try to predict what the demand would be,
say, from now to the next five years out.
Cloud customers not only have
an increasing appetite for, like, more and more bandwidth,
but they also want this bandwidth
with certain latency guarantees.
By adding more diverse cables,
that essentially increases the reliability
of the bandwidth that we can offer them.
- So, Google Cloud has become a big part of the equation,
but what about increasing the capacity
of the fiber itself?
- That's where my team comes in.
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Obviously, replicating a 10,000 kilometer
subsea cable in a lab is pretty difficult.
We do have fiber optic spools
that are about 80 kilometers long.
We actually daisy chain these fiber optic spools together
to try to replicate a Google Cloud network.
This optical spectrum analyzer shows four lasers.
Each is carrying 400 gigabits
of network capacity per second.
And in total, that's 1.6 terabits of zeros and ones.
- That's a lot of data to fit
through a fiber the width of a human hair.
But another way to increase capacity
is to squeeze more fiber pairs into a cable.
In 2020, we were able to fit 16 fiber pairs
into the Grace Hopper cable
instead of the usual six or eight.
That cable can transmit 340 terabits of data per second,
enough to stream this video in 4K
4.5 million times simultaneously.
But it's not just about capacity.
Building a cable takes a village,
and we work closely with many partners.
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- We rely on local partners' expertise,
insights, and even their local infra
to facilitate our cable landings.
We want to carefully ensure minimal interruptions
to local communities, such as fishery unions
and marine life heritages et cetera,
where we are constructing those cables.
- One of the final steps to laying a new cable
is making sure we have the most
up-to-date electronics in place to power it.
And we've made some impressive enhancements to Topaz.
Wavelength Selective Switch
for resilient and dynamic paths
was first sketched on a Google whiteboard
over four years ago.
Now this innovation is being implemented in Topaz
and adopted across the industry.
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- In the very early days of subsea technology,
a submarine cable was simply something that went
from one point to another point.
The Wavelength Selective Switch
allows us to effectively carve up the spectrum
on an optical fiber pair,
use some for this purpose, use some for another purpose,
in order to expand the capability.
End users benefit from our ability
to redirect traffic on the fly.
- So, if a new customer demands more capacity,
we can run commands from a computer
and traffic shows up quickly in a different place.
Pretty powerful, right?
- A cable like Topaz doesn't just improve
reliability between Canada and Japan,
it improves reliability of the entire network.
Google's network operates like a mesh.
Our organization focuses on creating solutions
that interconnect humanity,
and that's really the purpose of our network.
Our highest priority is to create a network
that society can depend on.
- It all comes together on a momentous day at shore.
Teams all over the world collaborate
to stretch our network fabric through an enormous feat
of partnership, physics and engineering.
It's our network that makes Google Cloud
ready for the next wave.
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