PORTLAND � FASTER, a consortium of six international companies, together with its supplier NEC Corp., has announced that construction and end-to-end testing of a new trans-Pacific submarine cable system, the �FASTER Cable System,� has been successfully completed. Service of the new system began on June 30.
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The new 9,000 km trans-Pacific cable lands in Oregon in the United States and two landing points in Japan � Chiba and Mie prefectures (see the cable’s route at right).
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The system has extended connections to major hubs on the West Coast of the U.S. covering Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay area, Portland and Seattle. The two landing points in Japan facilitate the cables easy access to major cities in Japan along with connectivity to many neighboring cable systems, in turn extending the cable’s capacity beyond Japan to other Asian locations.
�FASTER is the first trans-Pacific submarine cable system designed from day one to support digital coherent transmission technology, using optimized fibers throughout the submarine portion. The combination of extremely low loss fiber, without a dispersion compensation section, and the latest digital signal processor, which compensates for the huge amount of cumulative dispersion at the end of the cable, enable this six-fiber pair cable to deliver 60 Tbps of bandwidth across the Pacific,� according to NEC corporation press release.
Construction of the system was announced in August 2014 by the FASTER consortium, a partnership of China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, Google, KDDI and Singtel.
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