Google, Facebook Link Hong Kong And U.S With 12,800km Underwater Fibre Optics Cable

The cable will connect Manhattan Beach, California, to Tseung Kwan O, in Hong Kong.

The companies are joining forces with two other companies; TE SubCom and Pacific Light Data Communication (PDLC).

TE SubCom is a company owned by TE Connectivity, and is a global leader in submarine cables and undersea connectivity. PLDC is a new connectivity solutions company set up in Hong Kong, and is an emerging regional broadband service provider.

The undersea network being built is the first direct high capacity submarine cable between Hong Kong and Los Angeles. The network will be called Pacific Light Cable Network (PLCN), and is expected to be laid and operational by May 2018.

The cable will have 12,800km (7,953 miles) of fibre optics and have a huge capacity of 120 terabits per second. This will make it the “highest-capacity trans-Pacific” cable in existence – the record is currently held by Google’s ‘Faster’ cable.

With ‘Faster’, Google claims up to 10 terabits per second of the cable system’s total 60 terabits per second bandwidth established between Oregon and Japan. The company has direct access to a pair of “100 gigabits-per-second x 100 wavelength” optical transmission strands, with one strand for sending and one for receiving.

“From the get-go, the PLCN is designed to accommodate evolving infrastructure technology, allowing us to independently choose network equipment and refresh optical technology as it advances,” Google’s submarine networking infrastructure director, Brian Quigley, said in a Google Cloud Platform blog post.

“Most importantly, the PLCN will bring lower latency, more security and greater bandwidth to Google users in the Asia Pacific region.

“In addition to our existing investments in Asia Pacific cloud regions and the FASTER cable system, PLCN expands our ability to serve people in Asia, including Google Cloud and G Suite customers.”

So far, Google has stakes in no less than five submarine cables, making the Pacific Light Cable the sixth infrastructure of its kind. The other five are FASTER, MONET, SJC, Tannat and Unity.

Facebook is already working with Microsoft to build a giant cable under the Atlantic. And the new Pacific link — expected to begin operating in 2018 — is the sixth submarine cable in which Google has taken a stake.

Rumors about the project surfaced earlier this year, and the purported investment ranked as high as $400 million. At the time, neither Facebook, nor Google had confirmed involvement in the Pacific Light Cable project.

Microsoft and Facebook recently inked a partnership for the building of a trans-Atlantic cable, estimated to carry 160 Tbps.