Ever heard of FASTER? FASTER happens to be a consortium of half a dozen international companies. This consortium has worked alongside its supplier NEC Corporation of Japan in order to lay a submarine cable system from the US all the way to the Land of the Rising Sun, Japan. Aptly known as the "FASTER Cable System," this trans-Pacific submarine cable system will begin its service from today onward after a successful installation.
Just how long is the FASTER Cable System? We are talking about 9,000km of trans-Pacific cable that has been installed deep down in the sea, where it lands in Oregon in the United States, while featuring not one, but a couple of landing points over in Japan, particularly in the Chiba and Mie prefectures. With this particular system in place, it would mean it has extended connections all the way to major hubs on the West Coast of the US that will include Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Portland and Seattle.
As for the Chiba and Mie prefectures in Japan, these two landing points are there to facilitate the cable's easy access to major cities across Japan. Boasting robust and resilient connectivity to many other neighboring cable systems, this would mean that the cable's capacity will be extended to other Asian locations - and I am quite sure that the other countries will not complain about this development, but rather, more than welcome its existence.
The FASTER is proud to be the first trans-Pacific submarine cable system that has been specially designed right from the get go to support digital coherent transmission technology. It will make use of optimized fibers throughout the entire length of the submarine segment. Such a combination of extremely low loss fiber which does not have a dispersion compensation section, alongside the latest digital signal processor that will make up for the massive amount of cumulative dispersion at the end of the cable, opens up the door for this half-dozen fiber pair cable to deliver 60 Terabits per second (Tbps) of bandwidth from one continent to another, right smack across the Pacific.
Hiromitsu Todokoro, Chairman of the FASTER Management Committee, shared, "From the very beginning of the project, we repeatedly said to each other, 'faster, Faster and FASTER,' and at one point it became the project name, and today it becomes a reality. This is the outcome of six members' collaborative contribution and expertise together with NEC's support."
Kenichi Yoneyama, Project Manager for FASTER at NEC's Submarine Network Division, echoed, "This was the first trans-Pacific submarine cable built solely by NEC Corporation, employing the latest 100Gbps digital coherent optical transmission technology. We are honored that the consortium entrusted us to build FASTER. Although we faced many challenges during the construction, I am truly glad that we were able to overcome these and to welcome this day. This epoch-making cable will not only bring benefits to the United States and Japan, but to the entire Asia-Pacific region."
I suppose this new information "route" is best tested by two main categories - those who love to stream videos and other media, and gamers who are always searching for the lowest latency possible.
