wiredinUSA September 2014

’Faster’ cable to Japan

G o o g l e 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. will join five

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.

wiredInUSA - September 2014 i I

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