The companies - consisting of China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, Google, KDDI and SingTel - along with supplier NEC Corporation, said construction and end-to-end testing of the cable has been completed and will begin service June 30, 2016.
Spanning 9,000km across Japan and the West Coast in the US, FASTER claims to be the first transpacific submarine cable system designed to deliver 60Tbps of bandwidth using a six-fibre pair cable across the Pacific.
“The completion of the FASTER cable system will provide capacity to support the expected four-fold increase in broadband traffic demand between Asia and North America,” said Ooi Seng Keat, vice president of carrier services at Singtel Group Enterprise.
“By adding network redundancy and ultralow latency to our existing trans-Pacific cable systems, it reinforces our leadership in international data services in the region and enhances our infrastructure to support our customers’ critical data traffic.”
The cable lands in Oregon in the US as well as two landing points in Japan, namely Chiba and Mie. The two landing points in Japan are said to enable the cable’s easy access to major cities in Japan as well as other Asian locations.
The system is also said to have extended connections to major hubs on the West Coast of the US covering Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Portland and Seattle.
