Google and its partners started building it two years ago.
Google teamed up with five Asian telecom companies to fund a $300 million underwater cable network connecting the US and Japan in 2014.
In a blog posting announcing the cable was being turned on, Alan Chin-Lun Cheung, who is on Google’s Submarine Networking Infrastructure team, wrote:
“The FASTER Cable System gives Google access to up to 10Tbps of the cable’s total 60Tbps bandwidth between the US and Japan. We will use this capacity to support our users, including Google Apps and Cloud Platform customers. This is the highest-capacity undersea cable ever built — about ten million times faster than your average cable modem — and we’re beaming light through it starting today.”
The 9,000 km trans-Pacific cable has connections between Oregon in the US and two points in Japan. From Oregon, the system is connected to major hubs on the West Coast, covering Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Portland, and Seattle.
Google has launched the cable in anticipation of launching a new cloud-data center region in Tokyo later this year.
This article was originally published on Business Insider. Copyright 2016.
