Guam strategically placed to become a network gateway between the United States and Asia
Guam has an opportunity to take advantage of it’s strategically placed location as the last US destination before reaching Asia when it comes to the Internet. The opportunity is to become a network hub for Internet peering between Asian countries and the United States.
Building a neutral-carrier data center on our island could possibly attract hundreds of new technology jobs on the island as well as bring in technology-related business that will generate income for our island from mainland-based technology firms and international firms located in Asia.
The concept behind a neutral-carrier data center consists of Guam’s government or a privately-owned organization investing into building a facility to house the networking equipment and data center where major networks in the United States and in Asia could setup their networks to peer with each other from within the facility. Building out the data center of course would include laying out underground fiber optic lines that could handle the large capacity of data traveling through the facility. Some examples of carrier-neutral internet exchange points located in the United States include the New York International Internet eXchange or NYIIX, and the Los Angeles International Internet eXchange or LAIIX; both run by Telehouse. Another publicly traded company that specializes in setting up data centers across the United States is Equinix which has a data center located in Hawaii.
In addition to offering peering services, network-neutral data centers could offer colocation services to companies for web hosting, rent space out to content delivery networks to place caching servers in the facility for faster streaming of media between the United States and Asia, and more. With the growing dependency on the Internet as the medium of choice for various technologies which include telecommunications data, streaming media content, and the Internet, the need for connection hubs between the United States and Asia continues to grow.
Currently, the only two US destinations of choice for a last connection point closest to Asia are Hawaii and Guam. Hawaii’s government has already started looking into the idea of becoming a technology network hub between Asia and the United States, and already has some major internet backbone networks traveling through the islands. One of these networks is known as The Southern Cross Cable Network which provides most of the international bandwidth and traffic from Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii to the United States. Guam could follow in Hawaii’s footsteps by looking into building out a technology friendly infrastructure on the island that will be able to support the growth of our technology industry.
In a future post I’ll discuss some of the roadblocks Guam would need to overcome for this to become a reality.