A six-company consortium comprising China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, Google, KDDI and SingTel have agreed to build and operate a new Trans-Pacific cable system, “FASTER” with NEC Corporation as the system supplier.
The FASTER cable network which will cost approximately USD $300 million will connect the United States to two landing locations in Japan.
The new Trans-Pacific cable network is targeted to be ready-for-service during the second quarter of 2016.
According to the new release, 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).
"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.”
- Woohyong Choi, Chairman of the FASTER executive committee
"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,"“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.”
- Naoki Yoshida, General Manager at NEC’s Submarine Network Division
