At the end of June, Google and five other members of the FASTER consortium added a $300 million 60 Tbps (terabits per second) fiber optic undersea cable between Japan and the US to increase connectivity speeds.
The company is now extending its efforts to benefit Web users across Asia with a new 26 Tbps cable linking the FASTER cable in Japan to Taiwan, which houses Google’s largest data center in the continent.
The company says that this should help Google services like Gmail, YouTube and BigQuery load more quickly for users in the region. Yan Tang, Google’s Network Resource Regional Lead for the Asia-Pacific region, noted that it “should also improve the reliability and consistency of this speedier experience, since the cable was strategically built outside of tsunami zones to help prevent network outages related to natural disasters.”
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According to the company, the speed of its latest cable is enough to allow all 23.5 million people in Taiwan to send across a selfie to people in Japan every 15 seconds, amounting to 138 billion selfies a day – hence the illustration above.
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