Google to help lay $300m undersea internet cable to Japan
By the end of 2016 Google and a group of Asian telecommunications firms will have built $300m worth of internet cable, joining Japan to the US.
The project, called "Faster", will cater to rising bandwidth usage and will begin immediately. Internet traffic spanning the trans-Pacific route is becoming "intense" as smartphones, high broadband usage and business applications place ever greater demands on the existing infrastructure.
In a statement the "consortium of six global companies" said:
In order to address the intense traffic demands for broadband, mobile, applications, content and enterprise data exchange on the Trans-Pacific route, Faster will feature the latest high-quality 6-fiber-pair cable and optical transmission technologies, with an initial design capacity of 60 Terabytes a second.
The other five companies are China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, KDDI, SingTel and Global Transit.
Faster wont be Google's first such investment, in 2008 it was involved in laying the UNITY cable and in 2011 the South-East Asia Japan Cable (SJC).
In a post on Google+, the tech giant said:
At Google we want our products to be fast and reliable, and that requires a great network infrastructure, whether it's for the more than a billion Android users or developers building products on Google Cloud Platform. And sometimes the fastest path requires going through an ocean. That’s why we’re investing in Faster, a new undersea cable that will connect major West Coast cities in the US to two coastal locations in Japan with a design capacity of 60 Tbps (that's about ten million times faster than your cable modem).
Trans-Pacific route of Faster (Source: NEC)