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Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI Corporation, Pacnet, and SingTel, along with one other corporation, are building an undersea fiber optic cable connecting America and Japan.  The cable should cost around $300 million, and the last member of the six-company consortium is Google.

    Undersea Cable "Unity"

Google stated that construction on the cable has already begun, with early 2010 set as a target date for operation.  The cable "is expected to initially increase Trans-Pacific lit cable capacity by about 20 percent, with the potential to add up to 7.68 Terabits per second (Tbps) of bandwidth across the Pacific," according to the company.

Google claimed it isn't expanding too far outside its normal search and advertising sphere, however.  On the Official Google Blog, Francois Sterin wrote, "If you're wondering whether we're going into the undersea cable business, the answer is no.  We're not competing with telecom providers, but the volume of data we need to move around the world has grown to the point where in some cases we've exceeded the ability traditional players can offer."

Also, as a nice little PR touch, the cable has been named "Unity."

Some people and companies are still sure to feel uneasy, and it's possible this will touch off another competition between Google and Microsoft, or even Baidu.  Nonetheless, strange cable-cuttings and conspiracy theories aside, this looks to be a one-off development involving the search engine giant.