Not to mention that the Taiwan straits earthquake showed a clear lack of physical diversity on a number of important Pacific routes, which I know some companies are laying fiber to address.
Anyone who took the trouble to read the two articles knows that one of the two cables is a USA-to-China direct cable that does not hop through Japan. This is really part of a larger connectivity story for the People's Republic of China along with the trans-Russia cable being built by Russia's railway-backed TTC and China Unicom. http://europe.tmcnet.com/news/2007/09/20/2954870.htm I wouldn't be surprised if this is somehow connected with GLORIAD as well. In any case, the USA-China direct route is clearly avoiding the Taiwan Straits weak point. And the other cable, which Google is involved in, is connecting the USA and Australia, a country that has always had connectivity issues, especially pricing issues. This has led to a much higher use of web proxies in Australia to reduce international traffic levels and this may be the key to why, Google, an application developer and ASP/SaaS operator, is trying to build a cable link to the major English language market in Asia-Pacific. Seems to me both builds are adressing diversity issues in different ways, and if this results in a bandwidth glut to the region, that may be part of the plan. --Michael Dillon