According to Google, its 9,000km undersea cable named “Faster” between Japan and the US officially goes live. With this, internet users and our customers in Japan today should notice things seem to be moving a bit…FASTER.
The cable is first of its kind, with multiple colours (100) of light transmitted over various frequencies.
Urs Hölzle, Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure says that cable has 60Tbps (terabits per second) total capacity. It is more than any active subsea cable, and 10 million times faster than your cable modem.
It has a repeater, every 60km, to re-energize the light as it travels over 9,000km across the ocean floor
“Faster” is one of just a few hundred submarine cables connecting various parts of the world, which collectively form an important backbone that helps run the Internet.
“Faster” cost $300 million (£222m) and it was created after a partnership between six different companies namely, Google, China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI, and SingTel. These six companies were all involved in the cable’s creation and laying while NEC Corporation supplied the systems behind the cable.
In May, Microsoft and Facebook announced that they will be building an undersea cable from the east coast of the US to Spain to help speed up their global internet services.
