Google Opens Faster Big Data Pipe Between US and Japan
- by 7wData
Google on Wednesday unveiled its latest investment in long-haul undersea fiber optic cabling. Dubbed the "Faster Cable System," it is the highest-capacity undersea cable built to date, providing 60-Tbps (terabits per second) bandwidth between the United States and Japan.
It is about 10 million times faster than an average cable modem, Google noted.
Google is one of six members of the Faster Consortium, which officially announced the development of the cable in 2014. Google has sole access to the pair of 100Gb/s x 100 wavelength optical transmission strands that run between Oregon and mainland Japan. One is used for the sending data, while the other is for receiving.
The total investment in the Faster system reportedly approximated US$300 million.
Faster will be used to support Google users, including Google Apps and Cloud Platform customers, said Alan Chin-Lun Cheung of Google's submarine networking infrastructure group. Google will have access to up 10Tbps of the cable's total capacity. It will use the bandwidth to support its newly announced Google Cloud Platform East region in Tokyo, which is set to launch later this year.
The dedicated bandwidth that Faster can provide will ensure quicker data transfers, along with reduced latency, for GCP customers worldwide.
Faster is just one of Google's recent efforts to further develop the global Internet infrastructure. Google's investment in undersea cable systems began in 2008 with the 7.68Tb trans-Pacific Unity cable that went online in 2010. With Faster, Google now has a total of four undersea cables and plans to develop even more.
Other companies joined Google in the creation of the Faster Cable System, including China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI and SingTel. NEC Corporation supplied the systems that are required to run data through it.
Google and its Faster partners are not the only ones developing advanced undersea cables. Microsoft and Facebook last month announced a joint effort to build a new undersea cable across the Atlantic. The "Marea" system -- Spanish for "Tide" -- will offer speeds of 160Tbs. Construction on that cable will begin later this year.
The Faster cable system will provide expanded bandwidth, along with redundancy, to the seismically sensitive East Asia region, but it offers many other benefits as well.
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