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Google’s Asia services to be faster with new undersea cable
Posted On Sep 06 2016
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The cable operates by beaming light to transfer data, resulting in speeds of up to 60TB.
The new uplink between the FASTER cable site in Japan and Google’s data center in Taiwan should speed things along for users of Google’s services all across Asia, though Google cautions that the full effect won’t be noticeable immediately.
In June 2016, Google activated its $300M undersea cable network spanning the 5,000 miles between the west coast of the United States and Japan.
Google has just made online a new 26 Tbps undersea cable which has boosted the connectivity speeds to the Google services across Asia. Fresh from expanding its data centers in the region – which are located in Singapore and Taiwan – last year, the company said today that it has switched on a new undersea cable that will quicken services like YouTube and its cloud computing platform. It later joined a consortium of six companies, including NEC, China Mobile, China Telecom, Global Transit and KDDI, to extend the service and successfully connect Asian+American countries.
However, the extension to Taiwan doesn’t offer quite the same speeds as the cable that’s spanning the Pacific. The cable was specifically placed outside of tsunami zones, so it should also help prevent outages related to extreme weather conditions, according to a report from Venture Beat.
Yan Tang, Network Resource APAC Regional Lead, wrote in the blog post that with an online population in Asia growing at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world, it is critical to invest in the infrastructure required to support the internet in the region.
There are now two data centers in the region owned by the tech giant, in Taiwan and Singapore, and the latter facility is currently being upgraded, bringing Google’s overall investment in the region to roughly $1 billion. The initial design capacity of the undersea cable network has been estimated at 60 Tbps, but is now only being employed to provide a 26 Tbps bandwidth to its services – not fast enough!?
