wiredInUSA August 2016

Cable goes Faster A trans-Pacific fiber optic cable system, funded by Google and a consortium of five other international companies, has gone online and is ready for service.

Hiromitsu Todokoro, chairman of Faster’s management committee, said in a statement: “From the very beginning of the project, we repeatedly said to each other, ‘faster, Faster and FASTER’ and at one point it became the project name, and today it becomes a reality.” The Google consortium includes China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI and Singtel. The 9,000km cable, which has extended connections to Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay area, Portland and Seattle, was built by NEC Corporation.

The “Faster” system lands in Oregon and has two landing points in Japan, in the China and Mie prefectures. The cable delivers 60Tb per second bandwidth across the Pacific, and is believed to be the highest capacity undersea cable yet built - said to be around ten million times faster than the average cable modem.

wiredInUSA - August 2016

14