# FASTER Connectivity to Japan from US West Coast Coming Soonish



## mojeda (Aug 11, 2014)

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> *August **11,** 2014* – A consortium of six global companies announced that they have signed commercial agreements to build and operate a new Trans-Pacific cable system to be called “FASTER” with NEC Corporation as the system supplier. The FASTER cable network will connect the United States to two landing locations in Japan. The total amount of investment for the FASTER system is estimated to be approximately USD $300 million.
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> In order to address the intense traffic demands for broadband, mobile, applications, content and enterprise data exchange on the Trans-Pacific route, FASTER will feature the latest high-quality 6-fiber-pair cable and optical transmission technologies, with an initial design capacity of 60Tb/s (100Gb/s x 100 wavelengths x 6 fiber-pairs).
> 
> ...



Hopefully this will help west coast hosts/datacenters have better connectivity to the ASIA region.


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## William (Aug 11, 2014)

We'll see. CNC/CT was never known for open peering (or rather, in upgrading open peering ports) and charge extreme amounts in the US for private ports so this might prove useless after all (or useful if enough T1 upstreams of CNC/CT profit from the new route and give this to their customers)


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## drmike (Aug 11, 2014)

Looks like what Google has been trying to do for inroads into China.

Wonder how much cash Google is throwing into this project?

Odd to me that I see Chinese companies, Singtel (Singapore right?) .... but the project is in Japan....


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## William (Aug 11, 2014)

Singtel is a big player in entire Asia, just with main focus on SG and ID.


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## concerto49 (Aug 11, 2014)

KDDI is from Japan, but most cables usually do go to Japan first and then the rest of Asia.


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## danielm (Aug 11, 2014)

KDDI is pretty big in Asia as I understand it. They own Telehouse which has a presence in the US & Europe.


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## Wintereise (Aug 11, 2014)

Where in the US, any further data? Direct  SEA / SJ is most likely, but who knows.


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## mojeda (Aug 11, 2014)

Wintereise said:


> Where in the US, any further data? Direct  SEA / SJ is most likely, but who knows.


"Connections in the United States will extend the system to major hubs on the US West Coast covering the Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle areas."


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## concerto49 (Aug 11, 2014)

mojeda said:


> "Connections in the United States will extend the system to major hubs on the US West Coast covering the Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle areas."


His point is that doesn't say where. Not specific.


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## syncrohost (Aug 11, 2014)

Very interesting.  I guess we'll have to wait till 2016 to see how everything pans out.


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