New undersea cable will speed US-Japan connection

FASTER lands in OR in the us and has two landing points in Japan, in the Chiba and Mie prefectures.

He explains that a repeater is integrated into the first-of-its-kind cable about every 60 km to re-energize 100 different colors of light transmitted over various frequencies. Japanese company NEC Corporation began building FASTER back in 2014.

The work and end-to-end testing has been completed, and service will resume tomorrow (June 30). The completion of the Faster cable project may see Google Fiber show up in more cities in America.

After almost two years of construction, the $300 million, Google-backed trans-Pacific “Faster” cable system is now live. For member companies like Google, Singtel, and others, offering high bit rates and expansive network capacity is important to nurture business and services that depend on fast and reliable Internet connections.

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is now using a trans-Pacific cable that provides Internet speeds of 10 terabits per second. The group behind Faster includes Google, Singtel, China Telecom Global, China Mobile International, KDDI, and Global Transit. While the initiative is mainly focused to connect USA and Japan, the cable will also connect Taiwan and Japan over two fiber pairs that will deliver an initial capacity of 20 Tbps.

Google plans to utilise the new high-speed cable as part of its Google Cloud Platform when it launches in Japan later this year. Faster teamed up with NEC, a Japan-based global networking and IT giant, to help construct the cable system and bring it online. For comparison sake, UNITY, a Google-supported transpacific cable project that debuted in 2010, has a 7.68 terabits per second capacity. The system also has extensions to Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Portland and Seattle.

Increasingly, companies have been trying to make sure that customers get connectivity without minimal disturbance and that is making them try newer options.

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”.