Google Helps Pay For FASTER Undersea Cable To Asia

The challenge for the internet is keeping up with demand. Some key IT infrastructure and telecom companies around the globe work hard to manage the need for faster internet connectivity when internet usage grows steadily every year.

Back in 2010 Google co-funded the latest undersea fiber optic cable running from the United States to Asia in order to speed up connectivity between these two continents. Now it is 2014 and they have just agreed to help fund another new undersea cable from the US to Japan.

FASTER Network Cable

The last fiber optic investment is called FASTER. It is a project that involves some of the largest pan-Asian telecommunications companies like China Mobile, China Telecom, KDDI, SingTel and Global Transit. And now Google. Teh cover of the project is expected to be at least US$ 300m, but could rise still higher.

The new cable is expected to add 60 terabits of new bandwidth per second between the Americas and Asia. This makes even the US-based Google Fiber look slow by comparison. The cable is not expected to be completed until the middle of 2016, but internet capacity and speeds within Asia are likely to be noticeably improved thereafter.

Cable networks within Asia then distribute the data that will be transmitted over the undersea cable around over undersea cable networks that already exist within Asia. A large part of the faster connectivity is based in Japan where this cable will meet Asia, with other fast undersea connections to South Korea, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Thailand.

Where Web Sites Are Hosted Matters Greatly

The FASTER cable will help with web sites that are hosted outside of the Asia-Pacific region and lack access to a content delivery network (CDN) within Asia. A CDN can help load static information like content and images from local servers thereby reducing the amount of data needed from outside the continent. However, this is costly and usually limited to profitable sites that can afford the extra expense of doing so. Therefore, accessing web sites hosted in Europe and America can be much slower than Asia-hosted sites for people who reside in the Asia-Pacific region.

NEC Cable-laying Expertise

NEC is spearheading this development and building out the undersea cable. The NEC Corporation is experienced in laying underwater cable with the use of submarine technologies to do so. They have contracts with many major telecom operators across the globe. Just in March 7 2014 NEC signed a contract to supply a 100 gigabit per second capacity for a cable running from Singapore to Europe. They also have many other contracts for similar distribution cabling agreements.