Google is all set to switch on the underwater fiber optic cable that connects the United States West Coast to the Mie and Chiba prefectures in Japan across the Pacific. After several months of testing, the cable will go live on June 30.
The multi-million dollar new cable has been called the highest capacity underwater fiber optic cable ever built. It is capable of delivering 60 Terabits per second (Tbps) of bandwidth across the Pacific.
The six-fiber pair cable covers a distance of 9,000 km, right from Oregon to the east coast of Japan. It has several hubs located in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. With the fiber optic cable going live on Thursday, it will potentially connect the United States with several major cities across Asia.
Right from the commencement of the project, everyone concerned with it has been repeatedly saying each other 'faster, Faster and FASTER', Science Alert quoted the FASTER management committee chairman Hiromitsu Todokoro as saying. According to Todokoro, at one point it became the project name and it has become a reality.
Back in 2008, the Mountain View tech giant, Google, began investing in several undersea cables. However, perhaps the $300 million FASTER cable between the United States West Coast and Japan is the largest investment made by the company in this venture. In 2014, the company announced that they were becoming a part of a consortium of six companies, including NEC, China Mobile, China Telecom, Global Transit and KDDI, to connect the two countries better, Tech Crunch reported.
Aside from the undersea optic fiber cable connection, Google is also intends to introduce the company's Google Cloud Platform East Asia region in Tokyo sometime later this year. According to Google, with this dedicated bandwidth for all its operations in place, it will lead to faster data transfers as well as diminished latency while GCP customers send their applications and information to their customers globally.
Google's announcement mainly focuses on faster and better connection between the United States and Japan, but the FASTER network will also link Japan and Taiwan with two fiber pairs initially offering 20 Tbps. Google owns this extension between Taiwan and the Mie and Chiba prefectures in Japan is wholly owned by Google via the company's exclusively owned subsidiary, Google Cable Bermuda.
Watch what it takes to lay Google's super-fast submarine Internet cable: