Google is part of a global consortium that plans to install an undersea cable linking the U.S. and Japan to provide faster and more reliable Internet to Asia. The search giant hopes its “FASTER” project will make Google services more accessible to billions of people.
“At Google we want our products to be fast and reliable, and that requires a great network infrastructure, whether it’s for the more than a billion Android users or developers building products on Google Cloud Platform,” Google said. “And sometimes the fastest path requires going through an ocean.”
The FASTER project will see an undersea cable installed between major West Coast cities in the U.S. and two coastal locations in Japan. It will have a design capacity of 60Tbps, which is “about ten million times faster than your cable modem,” Google says — and it promises to make the Internet “faster and more reliable for our users in Asia.”
Google is teaming up with NEC, which will supply the FASTER cable system — as well as China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KIDDI, and SingTel to make the project happen.
FASTER will cost an estimated $300 million, and work on it will begin immediately. It is hoped that the cable will be running by the second quarter of 2016.
