Google has joined five Asian companies to build and operate a new $300 million Trans-Pacific submarine cable system, called FASTER, which will connect the US and two locations in Japan, providing a service 10 million times faster than a cable modem.
The project would see the 9,000-kilometer fiber-optic cable
landed at Chikura and Shima in Japan with extensions to other
Asian locations in the future, according to the companies.
In the US, the connection will cover major hubs on the West
Coast, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and
Seattle.
“Sometimes the fastest path requires going through an
ocean,” Urs Hölzle, Google’s senior vice president of
infrastructure, said in a Google Plus post Monday.
FASTER will have the design capacity of 60 Tbps (100Gb/s x 100
wavelengths x 6 fiber-pairs), which is about 10 million times
faster than your cable modem, the companies said.
In addition to Google’s previous investments – UNITY in 2008 and
SJC (South-East Asia Japan Cable) in 2011, “FASTER will make
the internet, well, faster and more reliable for our users in
Asia,” Hölzle added.
The project will be jointly managed by China Mobile
International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI, and
SingTel, with NEC as the system supplier. The total investment is
estimated at about $300 million.
“FASTER is one of a few hundred submarine telecommunications
cables connecting various parts of the world,” said Woohyong
Choi, the chairman of the FASTER executive committee.
“The FASTER cable system has the largest design capacity ever
built on the Trans-Pacific route, which is one of the longest
routes in the world,” Choi said. “The agreement
announced today will benefit all users of the global
Internet.”
The construction of the cable is to begin right away and the
system is planned to start operating during the second quarter of
2016.