60Tbps trans-Pacific cable going live today

The new trans-pacific cable is the first 60Tbps capacity cable to be laid out in anticipation of the increase in bandwidth usage in the coming years. Image INQUIRER.net

A Google-funded 60Tbps (Terabits per second) trans-Pacific cable is set to go live today, June 30, which would hopefully speed up traffic between Asia and North America.

The cable is the byproduct of project FASTER which is backed by Google, China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI and SingTel. It was manufactured by NEC and is made of six smaller fiber-pair cables that uses optical transmission technology reports The Next Web. It is the first trans-Atlantic cable to deliver 60Tbps of bandwidth.

This 9,000-km cable starts at Oregon in the US and ends at two points in Japan, namely the prefectures of Mie and Chiba. The vice president of the FASTER consortium stated that the state-of-the-art design of the cable will provide sufficient capacity for cloud computing, video streaming, analytics, and the Internet of Things.

Construction began in August 2014 marking a one-year-and-11-month completion period. Alfred Bayle