Google part of new undersea cable project to boost internet speeds to 60TB per second

Internet speed ten million times faster than what is currently offered could become a reality by 2016

Tech giant Google has partnered with five other players to launch a new Trans-Pacific cable system that can take internet speed to the next level.

Called “FASTER” the new network will extend faster connectivity to major cities in the US West Coast as well as extend the connection to several Asian locations beyond Japan.

“In order to address the intense traffic demands for broadband, mobile, applications, content and enterprise data exchange on the Trans-Pacific route, FASTER will feature the latest high-quality 6-fiber-pair cable and optical transmission technologies, with an initial design capacity of 60Tb/s (100Gb/s x 100 wavelengths x 6 fiber-pairs),” said a press release by NEC Corporation, which is the system supplier for the project.

The six global companies announced that they have signed commercial agreements to build and operate a new Trans-Pacific cable.

“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….” Said a Google plus post by Urs Hölze, Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure.

This new cable system will be landed at Chikura and Shima in Japan and will connect to many neighboring cable systems to extend the capacity beyond Japan to other Asian locations. Connections in the United States will extend the system to major hubs on the US West Coast covering the Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle areas.

Hölze’s post also notes that a speed of 60 Tbps  is about ten million times faster than your cable modem.

Woohyong Choi, the chairman of the FASTER executive committee, said, " 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 six-company consortium is comprised of China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, Google, KDDI and SingTel.

Construction of FASTER will begin immediately and the system is targeted to be ready-for-service during the second quarter of 2016, the release added.

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