Google is joining a consortium aiming to deliver trans-Pacific cabling that will be roughly 18 times faster than the company's previous venture in connecting the Western U.S. with Asia.
Called Faster, the $300 million project will connect submarine landing cable stations in Chikura and Shima, Japan, to U.S. hubs near the cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. The submarine cabling will deliver at 60 terabits per second, nearly 8 times faster than the 7.68-Tbps connection its predecessor Unity delivers. Work is starting now and the cable is expected to be operating by the second quarter of 2016.
The 60-Tbps transfer rate is roughly 10 million times faster than consumer cable modems, says Urs Hölzle, Google's senior vice president of technical infrastructure.
"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," said Hölzle.
The five other organizations that comprise the six-company consortium include China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI and SingTel.
Faster will join several hundred other cables that have been used to connect regions of the world via submarine telecommunications. It will be the fastest among the cables that run across the Pacific Ocean, according to Woohyong Choi, the chairman of the Faster executive committee, and has the largest design capacity.
"These cables collectively form an important infrastructure that helps run global Internet and communications," said Choi. "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."
The Faster consortium will be supported by NEC Corp., which will supply the hardware to required to bring the submarine cabling project into fruition. Naoki Yoshida, general manager at NEC's Submarine Network Division, said NEC will bring to the table more than 30 years of experience, during which it has constructed and placed roughly 125,000 miles of cabling, or 200,000 kilometers -- that's enough cable to circle the Earth five times.
"NEC Corp. is proud to be the system supplier for the Faster cable system, a state-of-the-art long-haul system that will provide additional connectivity and capacity between regions of the world that increasingly require more bandwidth," said Yoshida.
