After flipping the switch and connecting its first two major countries via the ‘FASTER’ undersea cable network a couple months ago, Google is now extending the service to another major region in Asia. The populous in Taiwan can now experience speedier connectivity to Google services in their region.
This has been made possible due to the switch to a new high-speed undersea cable system that extends the coveted FASTER connection from Japan to Taiwan. It connects to Google’s largest data center that it setup in the Asia-Pacific region last year, alongside another one in Singapore.
One may not notice right away, but this new cable connection will help Google products and services load more quickly across the region. This data center connects million of individuals across Asia with quick access to services like Gmail, YouTube, or even Google’s cloud service.
And since the undersea cable has strategically been placed outside tsunami zones, it should also be more reliable and consistent in terms of the speed, says Yang Tang, Network Resource APAC Regional Lead, Google. This will help make the internet services faster, but will also prevent network outages related to natural disasters. He further goes on to add,
With more people coming online every day in Asia than anywhere else in the world, we’ve been working hard to invest in the infrastructure needed to make the Internet work for all of us who live in the region.
If you’re unaware of the facts, Google first began the task of laying undersea cable in 2008. It later joined a consortium of six companies, including NEC, China Mobile, China Telecom, Global Transit and KDDI, to extend the service and successfully connect Asian+American countries.
The FASTER cable is a 9,000 undersea network which consists of high-quality 6-fiber-pair cable that cost about $300 million to build. The initial design capacity of the undersea cable network has been estimated at 60 Tbps, but is currently only being employed to provide a 26 Tbps bandwidth to its services — not fast enough!?
In addition to Google, Microsoft and Facebook have recently joined hands to lay an undersea cable network that initially connects United States to the southern European border. The project dubbed ‘MAREA’ will span across the entire 6,600 km width of the Atlantic and have an initial estimated design capacity of 160Tbps. This subsea cable network will then be extended to Middle East and Asia in the subsequent years.
