Google’s latest investment, undersea fibre optic cabling came online on Wednesday, June 29, 2016. This investment steps up the speed of the Cable System giving Google access to up to 10Tbps (Terabits per second) of the cable’s total 60Tbps bandwidth between the US and Japan.
Google claims to use the newly achieved capacity to support their users, including Google Apps and Cloud Platform customers. This is said to be the highest-capacity undersea cable ever built which could be about ten million times faster than the average cable modem.
The investment is anticipated to stimulate Google’s preparation to launch a new Google Cloud Platform East Asia region in Tokyo later this year. The dedicated bandwidth to this region would result in faster data transfers and reduced latency.
The FASTER Cable System is the latest example of Google’s ongoing investments in internet infrastructure and this project brings the global number of Google-owned undersea cables up to four.
In addition to greater bandwidth, the Cable System also brings valuable redundancy to the seismically sensitive East Asia region. The cable utilizes Japanese landing facilities strategically located outside of tsunami zones to help prevent network outages when the region is facing the greatest need.