Google connects Japan, US with underseas internet cable
Culture
A Google backed Trans Pacific internet cable is live.
Google is part of a six company consortium known as Faster.
Other Faster partners include telecoms like China Mobile, Singtel and KDDI.
Their goal was to create a faster connection between the US and Japan, well they did it.
Let's talk about the connection itself.
It's a 9,000 kilometer cable that connects Oregon in the United States To two cities in Japan, Chiba and Mie.
That's about 5600 miles for you imperial types.
The six fiber pair undersea cable can deliver data at 60 terabits per second across the Pacific Ocean.
The cable itself was built by NEC, a Japanese information technology company.
In the United States the cable also connects to Seattle, Portland, the San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles.
Google gets access to up to 10 terabits per second of that 60 terabit connection for its own services including Google Apps and its cloud platform.
To get a sense of scale how fast this thing is Google says it is about 10 million times faster than your average cable modem.
The connection was originally announced in 2014.
Back then Google's senior VP for technical infrastructure said the faster connection would make the internet more reliable for it's user in asia.
Google also invested in undersea cables back in 2008.
With a trans pacific unity cable.
The company is behind four undersea cables right now.
That's it for this Tech News Update.
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