Telecom carriers link onto $300m trans-Pacific optical fiber project

A customer makes a call in the business hall of China Telecom in Linyi city, Shandong province. [Photo/China Daily]

Trans-Pacific facility will mean '10 million times' faster connections

Two subsidiaries of China's top telecom carriers are joining a Google Inc-led project to build a new trans-Pacific submarine fiber optic cable system connecting Asia and North America, the companies said on Tuesday.

The $300 million project, named Faster, will significantly lift the Internet connection speed of China and other Asian nations after being put into use by mid-2016, according to a six-company consortium funding the construction work.

Two international subsidiaries of China Mobile Ltd and China Telecom Corp Ltd are partners of Faster, which has an initial design capacity of 60 terabytes a second. The connection speed is roughly 10 million times faster than a cable modem.

"With Faster, we will be able to cater to our customers' increasing demand for bandwidth," said China Mobile International Ltd, a Hong Kong-based arm of China Mobile. "The project will further consolidate China Mobile's advantages in the data service segment.

The company also plans to further strengthen network coverage and enable CMI to provide continuous and superior Internet connectivity and voice and data services to its customers," it said.

The exact investment by the Chinese companies wasn't disclosed. More than 75 percent of the nation's mobile phone subscribers were using China Mobile or China Telecom services by the end of last year, the companies' financial reports show. The project will connect Chikura and Shima in Japan to major West Coast cities in the United States, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland in Oregon and Seattle in Washington.

China is in the middle of a government-funded project to lift its Internet coverage and network speed. In March, Minister of Industry and Information Technology Miao Wei urged the telecom carriers to invest more in building Internet infrastructure in rural areas and improving connection speeds to overseas sites. Chinese carriers are expanding network coverage nationwide because they are eager to lift user numbers for fourth-generation telecom networks.

The country's mobile Internet user base totaled 500 million in 2013 and is on track for growth in the high double digits because of 4G expansion, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.

China will have 30 million 4G users by the end of 2014, just a year after the technology was launched in China, the MIIT estimated. Urs Holzle, senior vice-president of infrastructure at Google, said in a statement the company needs the extra bandwidth to serve its online video users and more than 1 billion people using Android-powered phones and tablets.

China is the world's largest Android phone market. Google's operating system accounts for about 80 percent of the Chinese smartphone market in terms of installation rates, according to industry research company IDC. Many Android users in China are shifting to 4G networks, which require swifter connection speeds. "The Faster cable system has the largest design capacity ever built on the trans-Pacific route, which is one of the longest routes in the world," said Woohyong Choi, the chairman of the Faster executive committee.