The Pacific Light Cable Network (PLCN), as the project is being called, will have an estimated capacity of 120 terabits per second. It will be the sixth long-distance undersea cable the company has participated in funding.
“These underwater cables will help increase the total bandwidth available not just to the giants that build them, but for pretty much everyone else as well. And they improve the resilience of the global internet by increasing the number of routes that data can travel across the oceans. But more to the point, they also give Facebook and Google more control over the infrastructure they depend on,” Wired reports.
Earlier this year, Google and several Asian telecommunications companies put online a 5,600-mile fiber optic cable running under the ocean from Oregon to Japan. The Oregon cable delivers data at a speed of up to 60 terabits per second, half the speed of the new project’s goal.
The PLCN is expected to be completed and online by 2018.
“PLCN will provide enough capacity for Hong Kong to have 80 million concurrent HD video conference calls with Los Angeles,” Brian Quigley, director of Google Networking Infrastructure, said in a blog post. “PLCN will bring lower latency, more security, and greater bandwidth to Google users in the [Asia-Pacific] region.”
The company plans to continue to invest in infrastructure projects like these throughout the coming years.
