Google“Google will join with five other companies to invest in a 10,000 km trans-Pacific submarine cable to carry data to and from Asia.”

Google said it would join with five other telecom companies — Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI, Pacnet, and SingTel — to invest $300 million in the construction of a 10,000 km submarine cable.

The high-speed fiber optic trans-Pacific cable, called Unity, will have a capacity of up to 7.68 Tbps and will run between the United States and Japan, about 6,200 miles. It is planned to accommodate demand for trans-Pacific bandwidth, which has grown at a rate of 63.7% annually between 2002 and 2007 and is expected to double biannually from 2008 through 2013, according to TeleGeography, a telecommunications consultancy.

… What Google gets is bandwidth at cost, said Stephan Beckert, director of research for TeleGeography, in an e-mail. Google, along with Comcast, is one of the few companies that have opted to purchase and light long-haul dark fiber, he said. It is the first non-telecom company to take an active role in submarine cable ownership.

- Thomas Claburn, InformationWeek: Link.

SingTel logoMore details from SingTel

Using state-of-the-art Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technology, it will support up to 960 Gbits per second per fibre-optic pair with a maximum of eight fibre pairs. By having a higher fibre count, it is able to offer more capacity at lower unit costs. Unity will have a potential design capacity of 7.68 Tbits per second, making it one of the highest capacity cables of its kind. This data rate is equivalent to more than seven million Internet users simultaneously having real-time access to a 1 Mb file.

NEC Corporation and Tyco Telecommunications have been jointly awarded the contract to implement this project.

- SingTel press release: Link.