MOSCOW, August 12 (RIA Novosti) - Google’s vice president Urs Holzle announced via Google+ the company’s investment in FASTER, a new undersea cable that will connect major West Coast cities in the US to two coastal locations in Japan, on August 11.
"FASTER is one of a few hundred submarine telecommunications cables connecting various parts of the world. These cables collectively form an important infrastructure that helps run global Internet and communications,” the chairman of the FASTER executive committee, Woohyong Choi said according to a NEC press release.
“The consortium partners are glad to work together to add a new cable to our global infrastructure. 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. The agreement announced today will benefit all users of the global Internet,” he added.
The $300 million investment with system supplier NEC Corporation is aimed at addressing the intense traffic demands for broadband, mobile, applications, content and enterprise data exchange on the trans-Pacific route, according to the NEC press release.
Holzle explained the latest high-quality 6-fiber-pair cable’s design capacity of 60 terabytes per second (Tb/s) is about 10 million times faster than a typical cable modem.
The new cable system connect Chikura and Shima in Japan to major US hubs including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle, the release confirmed.
FASTER along with Google’s previous investments of the 3.3 Tb/s trans-Pacific UNITY cable in 2008 and the 28 Tb/s South-East Asia Japan Cable (SJC) in 2011, will make the Internet more reliable and faster for Asian users, Holzle shared publicly via Google+. The $400 million SJC cable went operational last June, according to international technology news service The Next Web.
Members of the consortium include China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI and SingTel.
The name FASTER was adopted to represent the cable system’s goal of rapidly serving surging traffic demands, the NEC press release said. Construction of FASTER will begin immediately, with its launch targeted for the second quarter of 2016.
