Google helps build 'Faster' cable under Pacific Ocean

Google and five other large companies are teaming up to build a cable
under the Pacific Ocean that will deliver incredibly fast internet
speeds.

The cable, dubbed Faster, will connect the US with Japan and cost
about $300m (£179m; 225m euros), the consortium said.

The trans-Pacific fibre cable would deliver speeds of 60 terabytes per
second - enough to send more than 2,000 uncompressed HD films a
second.

The cable will be operational by 2016.

Google is working with a host of Asian telecoms giants - China Mobile,
China Telecom, Global Transit, KDDI, and SingTel.

'One of longest routes in world'

"Faster is one of a few hundred submarine telecommunications cables
connecting various parts of the world," said Woohyong Choi, chairman
of the consortium's executive committee. "These cables collectively
form an important infrastructure that helps run global internet and
communications.

"The Faster cable system has the largest design capacity ever built on
the trans-Pacific route, which is one of the longest routes in the
world."

The cable will connect Chikura and Shima in Japan to the major hubs on
the west coast of the US - Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and
Seattle.

Submarine cables are integral to the structure of how the world wide
web works. In 2008, communications between Europe, the Middle East,
and Asia were seriously disrupted after submarine cables were severed
near the Alexandria cable station in Egypt. Sixty-five percent of net
traffic to India was down at the time.

And KDDI, Japan's second-largest telecoms operator, had to do
extensive work to repair undersea cables damaged in the massive 2011
earthquake and tsunami.

Google already offers high-speed internet access directly in the US
through its Fiber service, with speeds of 1Gbps in cities like Austin,
Texas, and Kansas City, Kansas.

But the speeds from the new Faster cable far surpass anything
consumers can access in most of the US and Europe, though internet
speeds are generally much faster in Asia - South Korea wants to see
citizens equipped with 1Gbps connections by 2017, for example.

The fastest widely-available speed of broadband in the UK is 152mbps.
There are 1,000 megabits in one gigabit - and 1,000 gigabits in one
terabit - of data transmitted.

BBC