Google completes 60Tbps undersea cable from US to Japan

5,400 mile link from Japan to the US west coast completed in two years

Google and a consortium of technology companies, with Japan's NEC providing the technology, has completed the laying of the world's highest-capacity fibre internet cable between the US and Japan. The project took just under two years to complete.

The cable was announced in August 2014 and offers bandwidth of up to 60Tbps.

Google Fellow Urs Hozle, senior vice president of technical infrastructure, claimed that the pipe will provide "more [capacity] than any active subsea cable".

Google was one of six companies in the Faster cable project consortium, along with China Mobile, China Telecom, Global Transit, Japanese telecoms company KDDI, Singapore's Singtel and NEC.

The 9,000km cable stretches from Oregon on the US west coast to two points in Japan, Mie and Chiba.

These prefectures are "strategically located outside tsunami zones to help prevent network outages", according to Alan Chin-Lun Cheung, a member of Google's Submarine Networking Infrastructure team.

On the American side, the system has extended connections to the major hubs of the US west coast, including Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Portland and Seattle.

"In addition to greater bandwidth, the Faster Cable System brings valuable redundancy to the seismically sensitive East Asia region," said Cheung.

Google will have access to a 10Tbps portion of the cable's capacity, which the company said will be used to support Google Apps and the Google Cloud Platform.

The opening of the cable comes ahead of the launch of a new Google Cloud Platform East Asia region in Tokyo later this year.

Google now has stakes in four undersea fibre cables around the world, giving it dedicated global bandwidth to deliver services at high speed.

Google isn't the only tech firm feverishly laying ever-faster fibre cables under the world's seas and oceans.

Microsoft and Facebook announced a 4,000km undersea cable deal at the end of May that will link Virginia Beach on the US east coast with Bilbao in Spain.