Google announced today that it was building its own fiber optic cable to the trans-Pacific region, linking the United States and Japan. Neat!

The $300 million "Unity" project is a 10,000km linear cable system with 7.68 Tbps transmission capability.

Google's press release talks about the specific details. But the two things I find really interesting are:

A) Trans-Pacific bandwidth demand has grown over 60% over the last few years. That's a huge increase.

B) Google is moving to owning (and ultimately, I'm sure selling) infrastructure network capacity.

GoogleFi, Google's wireless network in Mountain View, was a testbed for something much larger, I'd guess.

It will be interesting to see how things progress with Google owning infrastructure and search.