Google Invests In $300 Mln FASTER Undersea Cable

(RTTNews) - Internet giant Google Inc. (GOOG, GOOGL) and five other tech companies signed commercial agreements to build and operate a new Trans-Pacific cable system to be called "FASTER" with NEC Corporation as the system supplier. The FASTER cable network will connect the United States to two landing locations in Japan. It is estimated that the total amount of investment for the FASTER system will be about US$300 million.

The five other tech companies are China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI and SingTel.

Construction of FASTER will begin immediately and the system is targeted to be ready-for-service during the second quarter of 2016.

FASTER will feature the latest high-quality 6-fiber-pair cable and optical transmission technologies, with an initial design capacity of 60Tb/s, in order to address the intense traffic demands for broadband, mobile, applications, content and enterprise data exchange on the Trans-Pacific route.

The new cable system will be landed at Chikura and Shima in Japan and will feature seamless connectivity to many neighboring cable systems to extend the capacity beyond Japan to other Asian locations. Connections in the United States will extend the system to major hubs on the US West Coast covering the Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle areas.

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

"NEC Corporation is proud to be the system supplier for the FASTER cable system, a state-of-the-art long haul system that will provide additional connectivity and capacity between regions of the world that increasingly require more bandwidth," said Naoki Yoshida, general manager at NEC's Submarine Network Division.