Google is a good example. The Umoja cable directly links South Africa to Australia. Humboldt links Chile to Australia. There is also a new planned cable directly linking the Indian East Coast to South Africa. No carrier consortium would ever entertain lighting such routes.
The
answer is simple. As Google revenues become bigger and bigger, the
opportunity cost per millisecond of any network disruption rises. More
money is lost per unit of time and hence it makes sense to plough more
resources into resiliency. As economists say, marginal benefit exceeds marginal cost. Google isn't building South Africa to India
because there is a flood of traffic between the two countries. A key reason to do is greater
routing options and hence a more stable network.
The
other part of the answer is Google's cloud aspirations. Its current
global market share is 15% versus Microsoft at 20% and Amazon's 28%. In
other words, it is playing catch up. Now Amazon has most of the Fortune
100 customers. It will be difficult due to cloud switching costs for
Google to take many of those huge corporate accounts. So Google is
focusing on the developing world where cloud demand is growing rapidly and
there is no clear vendor leader.
A
third factor is that Google has apparently decided to place many of its
cloud data centres in Australia because the country has strong rule of
law, ample space, and power. Google can provide cloud services for the
Pacific and Southeast Asia using Australia as the storage and computing
facilities.
A fourth and final factor
is that Google is likely to back up its customer's cloud data in a given
country by sending a copy to another country as opposed the less
resilient approach of mirroring data among cloud data centers in the
same metropolitan area or country. For example, the best way to protect
the data of its Indian costumers might be to keep a copy in South Africa
or Australia.
