Google invests in new submarine cable between Japan and the US

Singaporean telephone company SingTel, together with five partners including Google, is planning a new fibre-optic cable between Japan and the US. SingTel’s press release claims this is will help meet the demand from the rapidl growth in data traffic between Asia and the US. The 10,000 kilometre long high speed cable is to be laid between Chikura near Tokyo and Los Angeles in California. The project is set to cost around $300 million dollars (220 million euros). SingTel's partners in the project are Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI Corporation and Pacnet, which have together formed the “Unity” consortium.

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Advertising services provider and search engine operator Google is also involved in the consortium. A press release states that the new cable will increase capacity by 20 per cent to 7.68 terabits per second. The TeleGeography Global Bandwidth Report 2007 revealed that the demand for trans-pacific bandwidth increased by 63.7 per cent annually between 2002 and 2007. Further strong growth is expected, with a doubling of demand every two years.

Unity has contracted Japan’s NEC Corporation and US company Tyco Telecommunications to construct and install the system, which uses dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM). Each fibre-optic cable pair used in the submarine cable has a capacity of 960Gbit/s. Up to eight cable pairs will be deployed. Work is reported to have already started. The first data should be transmitted in the first quarter of 2010.

(jbe)