A consortium of six international companies, including Google, is to build an ultra high-speed submarine fibre optic cable system linking the US and Japan. The Unity cable system will provide much needed capacity to sustain the increasing data and internet traffic between Asia and the US.
The six companies are Singapore Telecommunications Ltd, Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, Google, KDDI Corporation and Pacnet. Unity is expected to cost around $300m and will initially increase trans-Pacific cable capacity by about 20 per cent. The cable will link Chikura in Japan directly to Los Angeles in the US and is expected to be ready for service in the first quarter of 2010.