This August, Google has announced the construction of a submarine high-speed cable system which will connect the West Coast of the United States with Japan across the Pacific Ocean. To implement the project known as Faster, the company has joined forces with five large Asian telecommunication companies: China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI and SingTel. The investment is approximately 300 million dollars.
With this network infrastructure Google aims to guarantee the necessary speed and reliability to consumers of its products. “And sometimes the fastest path requires going through an ocean,” the vice-president of Technical Infrastructures, Urs Hölzle, states on his Google+ profile. FASTER will be constructed using 6 pairs of fibre optic cable and will have the highest data transfer capacity of all the cables constructed to date on the trans-Pacific route: 60 terabytes per second. This means it will be ten million times faster than the cable modem.
A couple of months ago we published two articles on this blog about current world telecommunications maps. In the first we talked about some applications and tools which enable us to visualise what is happening on the Internet (the evolution of the number of users, our behaviour on the net, the traffic on the most visited websites, etc.), while the second focused on the submarine cable networks, through which the majority of international communications are transmitted. Under the seas and oceans there are around 200 fibre optic cables via which Internet data travels (in 2013, 51 thousand million gigabytes per month).
The construction of Faster will begin immediately and should be completed by the end of 2016. The system will connect the hubs of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle with the Japanese cities of Chikura and Shima. NEC Corporation will supply the system.