The Google-funded FASTER project alongside five telecommunication companies — KDDI, China Mobile International, Global Transit, SingTel and China Telecom Global — will be going online today.
The project was a joint effort between the companies, launched back in 2014, which aimed to deliver a faster bandwidth experience to consumers in the Asian region.
An undersea fiber optic cable of about 9,000 km in length was laid through the trans-Pacific region between two landing ports in Japan, Chiba and Mie prefectures, and the West Coast of the U.S., covering areas such as the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Seattle and Portland.
The cable has the capacity to deliver a bandwidth of 60 Tbps, which Google claims to be 10 million times faster than the "average cable modem" with about 10 Tbps of this bandwidth allocated to the company.
"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," comments the chairman of the FASTER Management Committee, Hiromitsu Todokoro.
On a more technical aspect, the cable combines major breakthroughs found in fiber optic technologies, specifically an "extremely low loss fiber" and the "latest digital signal processor" and was initially designed "to support digital coherent transmission technology."
The 9,000 km cable was solely built by the NEC Corporation and features the latest 6-fiber-pair structure, enabling the cable to carry data transmissions in such high rates despite its massive length. The modem was also specifically manufactured to withstand the seismic activities surrounding Japan to make it capable of delivering the needed emergency transmissions in times of national calamities.
"The cable utilizes Japanese landing facilities strategically located outside of tsunami zones to help prevent network outages when the region is facing the greatest need," a Google blog announcement writes.
The company also announced that the dedicated cable will bring a much smoother experience to companies that will be signing up for its upcoming Google Cloud Platform expansion in the East Asian region, situated in Tokyo, Japan. The physical cable that now connects Japan relatively closer to Google data centers should bring "lower latency and greater responsiveness" for services utilizing the company's cloud storage.
"Dedicated bandwidth to this region results in faster data transfers and reduced latency as GCP customers deliver their applications and information to customers around the globe," the company writes.
Interested applicants may visit the Google Cloud Platform Blog for more details.
Photo: Shawn Collins | Flickr
