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Google world domination

At the OFC/NFOEC exhibition last week, Google was recruiting for engineers - yet more evidence that the search engine company believes in controlling its own infrastructure.

Some of the jobs being advertised include project manager for network acquisition, network engineer, deployment, and optoelectronics engineers. According to its website, the company's platforms team "designs and builds the software, hardware, computing platform and network technologies that power all of Google's services".

Google's presence at the show coinsided with the general release of its plans for the Unity submarine cable, which will give a consortium of owners, including Google, access to 7.68 Tbit/s of capacity across the Pacific. Here's Google's own take on why the company is building an undersea cable system. In a nutshell, existing cable systems aren't able to supply enough bandwidth, apparently.

Similarly, at the end of last year it emerged that Google has built its own Ethernet switches, because commercially-available options didn't meet the company's requirements. Interesting. All this has left some people asking if Google could be the source of the innovation that gets the industry out of the capacity "dead end" it is facing after 100 Gbit/s.

Posted by Pauline Rigby on February 29, 2008 1:00 PM | Permalink