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wiredInUSA - September 2014
10
’Faster’ cable to Japan
G
o
o
g
l
e
will
join
five
Asian
telecommunications firms to build and
operate an underwater cable system
from the US to Japan to support rising
bandwidth usage and link Google data
centers across the world.
The optical fiber system, named ‘Faster’
will initially have a data capacity of 60
terabytes per second. Construction will
begin immediately, with completion
targeted for the second half of 2016. It
will be landed at Chikura and Shima in
Japan, and will connect to neighboring
cable systems to extend Internet
capacity beyond Japan, throughout
Asia. In the US, the system will connect
to major hubs on the west coast such
as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland
and Seattle.
Around $300 million will be invested in
the system by Google, China Mobile
International, China Telecom Global,
Malaysia's Global Transit, Japan's KDDI
and Singapore's SingTel.
“The agreement announced today will
benefit all users of the global Internet,”
said Woohyong Choi, the Faster
executive committee chairman.
It will benefit Google by helping the
company to connect its data centers
in the US and Asia, and to better serve
its own internal capacity needs. ‘Unity’,
a separate, but similar, undersea
cable system also backed by Google,
went into service in 2010 and another
Google-backed cable, the southeast
Asia-Japan system, went live last year.
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