Tokyo (Japan) - With severed cables causing Internet outages to several countries in recent years, it was only a matter of time before funding is found to create another link in the complex globe of cable connections.
Thus, we're not surprised to receive a press release that six companies joined up in project Unity, a $300 million heavy fiber-optic cable setup that will connect the US and Japan. The new system will increase North American-Asian bandwidth by as much as 20%, adding its 7.68 Tbps or 960 GB/s.
The consortium said that Trans-Pacific bandwidth hunger grew by 63.7% in five years (according to the TeleGeography Global Bandwidth Report, 2002-2007) and estimates that with the expansion of video content on the Internet, bandwidth demand will double every two years. It's suspiciously similar to Moore's law, we would say.
It is interesting to see who the members of this consortium are: Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, Google, KDDI Corporation, Pacnet and SingTel. As you can see, Google stepped in to join the efforts of multinationals from India and Japan to finally aid the pain called Pacific Ocean.
The cable itself will be long 10.000 kilometers or around 6150 miles, connecting Tokyo and Lost Angeles. And if you wondered who won the $300M heavy contract, answer is NEC Corporation and Tyco Telecommunications. Construction has already started, and the first bits should start flowing through this optical pipe in Q1 of 2010. And there is going to be quite a lot of these first bits, since first fiber cable will be able to push 960Gbps.
