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FASTER Connectivity to Japan from US West Coast Coming Soonish

mojeda

New Member
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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.
 
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).
 
This new cable system will be landed at Chikura and Shima in Japan and will feature seamless connectivity to many neighboring cable systems to extend the capacity beyond Japan to other Asian locations. 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.
 
The six-company consortium is comprised of China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, Google, KDDI and SingTel. The name FASTER was adopted to represent the cable system’s purpose of rapidly serving surging traffic demands.
 
Mr. Woohyong Choi, the chairman of the FASTER executive committee, said, "FASTER is one of a few hundred submarine telecommunications cables connecting various parts of the world. These cables collectively form an important infrastructure that helps run global Internet and communications. The consortium partners are glad to work together to add a new cable to our global infrastructure. The FASTER cable system has the largest design capacity ever built on the Trans-Pacific route, which is one of the longest routes in the world. The agreement announced today will benefit all users of the global Internet.”
 
“NEC Corporation is proud to be the system supplier for the FASTER cable system, a state-of-the-art long haul system that will provide additional connectivity and capacity between regions of the world that increasingly require more bandwidth," said Mr. Naoki Yoshida, general manager at NEC’s Submarine Network Division. “Backed by more than 30 years of experience in constructing over 200,000 kilometers of cables, NEC is one of the world’s top vendors of submarine cable systems.”
 
Construction of FASTER will begin immediately and the system is targeted to be ready-for-service during the second quarter of 2016.

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

pr0
Verified Provider
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)
 

drmike

100% Tier-1 Gogent
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.... 
 

danielm

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

mojeda

New Member
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."
 

concerto49

New Member
Verified Provider
"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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