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Monday, September 29, 2008

What is the bandwidth of transpacific undersea cable? (about 4Tbps now)

A new transpacific undersea fiber-optic cable called Trans-Pacific Express is completed. It's a 18,000 kilometer (11,000 miles) cable linking US, China, South Korea and Taiwan by six telecoms (US Verizon, South Korea Korea Telecom, Taiwan Chunghwa Telecom, China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Netcom). The cable stretches from Nedonna Beach, Oregon, to Qingdao and Chongming in China, and will have landings in Tanshui, Taiwan, and Keoje, South KoreaIt costs $500 million, evenly divided by six companies.

According to dailywireless.org, it is configured to handle 1.28 terabits per second (Tbps). But the design capacity of this cable is 5.12 Tbps. The customers can book individual connections running 10Gbps. It is designed to handle 62 million simultaneous phone conversations, 60 times overall capacity of China-US cable in December 2006, when the project was started.

US AT&T and Japan NTT also plan to invest in the project to extend the cable to Japan. It is amazing that the project completed in less than 2 years.

In a separate project, Google partners India Bharti Airtel, Malaysia Global Transit, Japan KDDI, Hongkong Pacnet, and Singapore Telecom to form a consortium, dubbed Unity. They are working a $300 million, 10,000 kilometer figer-optic submarine cable, connecting Asian and North America. This cable provides connectivity between Chikura, located off the coast near Tokyo, to Los Angeles and other West Coast network points of presence. According to Google news release , the capacity is up to 7.68Tbps. Is Unity cable more cost effective than Trans-Pacific Express?

Before Trans-pacific Express project, It was estimated by TeleGeography , transpacific bandwidth was 2.726 Tbps, 1/2 of transatlantic bandwidth is 5.547 Tbps.

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