Google is backing a $300 million Trans-Pacific cable system

Google is joining up with China Mobile International, China telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI, and SinTel to back a $300 million, Trans-Pacific, high-speed internet cable system that will run across the Pacific Ocean to connect the west coast of the United States to Japan.

The cable system, which goes by the name of FASTER, will transmit information at a whopping 60 Tb/s. This signifies the goal of meeting the rapidly growing demand for traffic according to a statement made by NEC, the provider of the cable system, yesterday morning.

Woohyong Choi, chairman of the FASTER executive committee, believes that users across the globe will benefit from the cable system. “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 general manager of NEC’s Submarine Network division, Naoki Yoshida, has said, “NEC Corporation 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.”

This cable system could have big implications for Google on the public-cloud front, as well as for mobile needs. Urs Hölzle, Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure, indicated as much in a Google+ post yesterday morning:

“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 U.S. to two coastal locations in Japan with a design capacity of 60 Tbps (that’s about ten million times faster than your cable modem). Along with our previous investments – UNITY in 2008 and SJC (South-East Asia Japan Cable) in 2011, FASTER will make the internet, well, faster and more reliable for our users in Asia.”

Read more about the story at the Wall Street Journal.

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