HAGÅTÑA (The Guam Daily Post) — Google has announced plans for a Central Pacific Connect Initiative, which will connect Guam to Fiji and Fench Polynesia through the delivery of two new intra-Pacific cables, called Bulikula and Halaihai. The project is being done in collaboration with Amalgamated Telecom Holdings, APTelecom and Telstra, Google said.
The Central Pacific Connect Initiative ultimately will create a “ring” of connectivity between Guam, French Polynesia and Fiji that includes pre-positioned branching units that will allow other countries and territories in Oceania to take advantage of the “reliability and resilience resulting from the Initiative,” Google said in a press release on the project.
According to Brian Quigley, vice president of Global Network Infrastructure at Google, the project will benefit residents on Guam in three key aspects – latency, scalability and reliability.
“If you’re looking at the latency today for connectivity from Guam to Google, you’ll see a fundamental shift in the time it takes to hit a Google front end, have a reaction and have a result to a query. So, you will see changes in latency that fundamentally transform the speed of the internet in Guam,” Quigley said at a press conference Thursday.
Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero said Guam recently received approval for its action plan for the $156 million Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment, or BEAD, grant obtained in June 2023.
“One of the underlying influences and drive with this (grant) is to improve latency in Guam. And so, from the cable point of view, that’s important to complement what we want to do in the land area. And we’re going to be pushing out a lot of resources to work in partnership with data centers or to also establish and provide more options for data centers using this BEAD program. So you’ll have the information coming through the cable and then being distributed out to the end users through an improved data center,” Leon Guerrero said Thursday during the press conference.
In addition, Leon Guerrero said if there was available land on the island for cable landings through the Guam Ancestral Lands Commission or the Chamorro Land Trust Commission, that would be a major benefit in terms of leasing properties to businesses, Google or other networks because that would mean more revenues for the commissions, “which would just fall right back into the hands of our people.”
Once operational, Bulikula and Halaihai will join Guam’s existing subsea cable portfolio, which includes Apricot, Echo and the Taiwan-Philippines-U.S. cable announced last year, “accelerating the island’s position as a growing gateway for international connectivity,” the release on the Central Pacific Connect Initiative stated.
Currently, Google is conducting deep-water surveys for the two new cables, Quigley said, and is anticipating completion in 2026.
Consultant Mathew Herman, left, Brian Quigley, vice president of Global Network Infrastructure at Google, center, and Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero are seen Thursday, Jan. 18, 2024, at a virtual press conference regarding the Central Pacific Connect Initiative.
