There’s a Mountain View-based tech giant that loves speed and the internet — and they prefer both when they work together. Most international internet traffic travels over networks of undersea fiber-optic cables that link countries and regions, requiring significant investment and ongoing maintenance to remain reliable and protected from the elements.
A new high-capacity Trans-Pacific cable system named FASTER was planned for completion by Q2 2016 and counted Google among its backers. The roughly $300 million project was to be developed jointly by China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI, and SingTel, with NEC serving as the system supplier.
FASTER’s initial design capacity was announced at 60 Tb/s, achieved through six fiber pairs operating at 100 Gb/s across 100 wavelengths. The system was designed to connect major U.S. hubs including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle with landing points at Chikura and Shima in Japan. It was also intended to provide onward capacity to neighboring cable systems serving other Asian countries.
“FASTER is one of a few hundred submarine telecommunications cables connecting various parts of the world,” said Woohyong Choi, chairman of the FASTER executive committee. “These cables collectively form important infrastructure that keeps the global Internet and communications running.”
The addition of the FASTER cable would expand the already complex web of systems that underpin global connectivity. “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,” Choi added. “The agreement announced today will benefit all users of the global Internet.”
For companies that deliver large-scale online services, investing in foundational infrastructure like submarine cables is essential to maintain speed and reliability. On Google+, Urs Hölzle of Google explained their motivation: “At Google we want our products to be fast and reliable, and that requires a great network infrastructure, whether it’s for the more than a billion Android users or developers building products on Google Cloud Platform. And sometimes the fastest path requires going through an ocean.”
Investments in submarine cable projects like FASTER help increase capacity and reduce latency across transoceanic routes, benefiting content providers, cloud services, enterprises, and end users by enabling faster data transfers and more resilient connections. They also require collaboration among multiple operators to share cost, expertise, and operational responsibilities.
Beyond raw capacity, modern submarine systems incorporate advances in optical transmission, repeaters, and branching units to support scalable, efficient traffic growth and to interconnect with regional networks. By linking major hubs on both sides of the Pacific and offering access to additional Asian systems, FASTER aimed to strengthen redundancy and route diversity for cross-Pacific traffic.
Such projects reflect broader trends in global network expansion: rising demand for cloud computing, streaming, mobile services, and international business traffic continues to drive investments in subsea infrastructure. As traffic volumes grow, so does the need for robust, high-capacity links that can carry large amounts of data with low latency and high reliability.
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