Google and five Asian telecoms have begun using an undersea cable connecting Oregon and Japan. At 60Tbps, "this is the highest-capacity undersea cable ever built," and Google will have access to 10Tbps of that, the company said in an announcement yesterday.

"We'll use this capacity to support our users, including Google Apps and Cloud Platform customers," the announcement said. "This is especially exciting, as we prepare to launch a new Google Cloud Platform East Asia region in Tokyo later this year. Dedicated bandwidth to this region results in faster data transfers and reduced latency as GCP customers deliver their applications and information to customers around the globe."

NEC is the supplier that built the $300 million "Faster Cable System" for Google, China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI, and Singtel. It won't be the highest-capacity cable for very long, as Microsoft and Facebook recently announced a 160Tbps undersea cable from the US to Europe, to be completed in October 2017.

The NEC-built Faster cable, 9,000km long, lands in Oregon and has two landing points in Japan. There are also "extended connections" to major US West Coast hubs to cover Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Portland, and Seattle, NEC said. Faster is stylized as "FASTER," but it's not an acronym. As you might expect, it was named "Faster" because the companies building it wanted a faster cable.

"Faster is the first trans-Pacific submarine cable system designed from day one to support digital coherent transmission technology, using optimized fibers throughout the submarine portion," NEC said. "The combination of extremely low-loss fiber, without a dispersion compensation section, and the latest digital signal processor, which compensates for the huge amount of cumulative dispersion at the end of the cable, enable this six-fiber pair cable to deliver 60 Terabits per second (Tbps) of bandwidth across the Pacific." The cable uses Japanese landing facilities outside of tsunami zones to prevent network outages.

Google will have sole access to a pair of fiber strands, one for sending and one for receiving. Each strand has 100 wavelengths, each of which provides capacity of 100Gbps. This is the fourth undersea cable owned by Google, with the first being the 7.68Tbps trans-Pacific Unity cable that came online in 2010. Construction on the Faster cable was announced in August 2014.

According to Singtel, the cable will add network redundancy and ultra-low latency to its existing trans-Pacific cables while supporting an expected four-fold increase in Internet traffic demand between Asia and North America.