Two of the biggest names in Internet are teaming up to build an 8,000 mile underwater fibre optic cable, running from Los Angeles to Hong Kong.
The Pacific Light Cable Network (PLCN) cable will stretch 12,800km and will have an estimated capacity of 120 terabits per second.
The new ocean network will be designed to stay out of tsunami zones, and will accommodate more and more people from Asia who go online more than any other people in the world.
Brian Quigley, director of Google Networking Infrastructure, said: “PLCN will bring lower latency, more security, and greater bandwidth to Google users in the Asia-Pacific region.”
Facebook and Google are doubling down on internet infrastructure in order to further their trend of increasingly building their own pathways to their end-users to cater to demand for bandwidth-intensive content.
Video streams are an important focus, with the world’s biggest tech companies preparing for video-heavy data links. In a blog post, Google reported that the new bandwidth could accommodate 80 million simultaneous high-definition video calls between the two regions.
“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 reported.
It is not the first time the two tech giants have worked together, and they plan to continue to invest in infrastructure projects like these throughout the coming years, aiming to provide a faster and more reliable service to its customers.
The PLCN is expected to be completed and online by 2018.
Posted on Tuesday, November 15, 2016
