Google has reportedly joined hands with five Asian tech giants to develop a $300 million underwater cable network that will connect the United States to Japan.
The Trans-Pacific cable, to be called as “Faster,” will connect Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco, Oregon and Seattle to Japan’s coastal cities Chikura and Shima. The cable network will offer an initial capacity of 60 terabits per second, which is about 10 million times faster than the standard cable modem.
China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI, and SingTel are the other five major Asian wireless and telecommunications companies to collaborate with Google for the cable project. The IT services and products company NEC Corp will be the main supplier for the project. The construction of the cable will begin immediately, and is slated to be ready for service by the second quarter of 2016.
Urs Hölzle, senior vice president of technical infrastructure for the Google Cloud Platform, on his Google+ page on Monday said that this project aims at offering faster and more reliable internet connection to the company’s Android user base of more than one billion worldwide and counting.
Woohyong Choi, chairman of the Faster executive committee, said that Faster, once completed, will be one of a few hundred submarine telecommunications cables connecting various parts of the world. The Faster cable system will boost 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 will benefit all global Internet users.
This is not the first time that Google has invested in underwater cables. In 2008, the company backed cable routed to Japan with “Unity” and another in 2011 that connects Japan and Southeast Asian countries including the Philippines and Thailand.
