In brief: Two of the world’s largest tech companies are joining forces to create a new subsea cable that will boost Internet capacity, redundancy and reliability in the Asia-Pacific region. Facebook said the Apricot cable system will initially have a capacity of more than 190 terabits per second and is part of an ongoing effort to better serve the more than 3.5 billion people that use its services each month.
Apricot is a new subsea cable from Google and Facebook that will connect Singapore, Japan, Guam, the Philippines, Taiwan and Indonesia. The 12,000-kilometer cable will feature a “state-of-the-art submersible reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer employing wavelength selective switch for a gridless and flexible bandwidth configuration, based on space division multiplexing design.”
GMA News Online further reports that PLDT Inc. is also part of the Apricot cable consortium, and is set to invest $80 million into the project. The publication additionally notes that the cable will utilize 400Gbps transmission technology.
Google has been keeping busy with subsea cable projects as of late, which isn’t all that surprising considering our increasingly digital lifestyles and the fact that 98 percent of all international Internet traffic is now handled by undersea cables.
Back in June, the search giant announced the Firmina cable, set to connect East Coast of the United States to Las Toninas, Argentina, with branches in Praia Grande, Brazil, and Punta del Este, Uruguay. Once finished, it will be the longest cable in the world capable of running entirely from a single power source at one end.
Last summer, Google announced it was building a private subsea cable called the Grace Hopper cable to connect the US with other parts of the world.
The Apricot cable is expected to launch sometime in 2024.
https://www.techspot.com/news/90807-google-facebook-building-subsea-cable-system-boost-internet.html
