Google's 9,000km internet cable connecting the USA with Japan switches on

Scorpus

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The internet infrastructure linking North America with Asia is about to get a whole lot faster, as a giant undersea fiber cable partly funded by Google is set to go live today.

The undersea cable, known as the "Faster Cable System", was constructed by NEC and funded by a consortium of six companies that include Google and several Asian telecom giants. Amounting to 9,000 km of cable, Faster spans from Oregon in the United States to two landing points in Japan's Chiba and Mie prefectures.

NEC says the six-fiber pair cable is capable of 60 terabits per second of throughput, making it the only trans-pacific cable to offer this sort of capacity. Impressively, NEC created this cable using extremely low-loss fiber without a dispersion compensation section, instead relying on digital processing to compensate for dispersion at the ends of the cable.

When the Faster Cable System was initially announced in 2014, it was expected to cost around $300 million to construct. It's not clear how much Google specifically invested into the cable, but it's not the first international cable investment by the company as they look to own more network infrastructure.

There were "many challenges during the construction" of Faster, according to NEC's Project Manager Kenichi Yoneyama, however the finished product will "not only bring benefits to the United States and Japan, but to the entire Asia-Pacific region."

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And you can bet that the bigger subscribers are going to pay a pretty penny for access.......
 
And people scoffed at the Transatlantic cable laid in about 1850 and it's eye watering cost, they said it would never succeed and was a waste of everything.
 
And you can bet that the bigger subscribers are going to pay a pretty penny for access.......
Your comment doesn't even make sense. What bigger subscribers are you talking about? A lot of your comments on here seem to be complaints about something supposedly getting more expensive, but are usually too vague for anyone to figure out what your complaint is actually about.
 
I'd love to see a KML file that shows this cable in Google Earth. Turn off the view of the water surface and the view of the sea floor is incredible ... with some incredible ridges and trenches for undersea cables to cross.
 
if you want to live in the a$$h0le of nowhere that's your prerogative, should your fast internet be subsidised hell no. Either move, pay big or if possible set up a microlink to somewhere more civilized
You miss the point...Mr Costanza
 
What a friggin' waste. Connect me and everyone else along the highways out in the boonies
if you want to live in the a$$h0le of nowhere that's your prerogative, should your fast internet be subsidised hell no. Either move, pay big or if possible set up a microlink to somewhere more civilized

Yep, I live in the "a$$hole of nowhere and had to put up a 85 foot tower to get half a$$ decent internet, but in my opinion the benefits of being able to have 50 cars on blocks, run around butt naked, have a 5 acre garden, and live like a slob without having to deal with a homeowners association, or city ordinance far outway the benefits of fast cheap internet so I have no right to complain when others get it, or when large corporations lay fiber that I wont benefit from " witch I will benefit from, just not necessarily directly ". Besides, its their fiber, what right do I have to tell them " put it here, so I can plow it! "
 
if you want to live in the a$$h0le of nowhere that's your prerogative, should your fast internet be subsidised hell no. Either move, pay big or if possible set up a microlink to somewhere more civilized
Ironically the higher the population, the less civilized people tend to be.
 
if you want to live in the a$$h0le of nowhere that's your prerogative, should your fast internet be subsidised hell no. Either move, pay big or if possible set up a microlink to somewhere more civilized
Ironically the higher the population, the less civilized people tend to be.

He's not really wrong though. However, I think ISPs (and their political minions) should stay the hell out of the way if the citizens of "AoN" want to build and pay for their own municipal broadband program so they can have faster internet. That way, they don't have to wait until the ISP decides it's profitable to run cable out that way.
 
Every person deserves the right to free and fast access to information in this day and age. No matter where they live.

My email signature: There is only one race: The Human Race.
 
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