Google Buys a Piece of a Cable To Japan

Googling Yourself writes "Google announced that they will be part of a six-company consortium that will build a high-bandwidth sub-sea fiber optic cable linking the US and Japan. The new cable system, named Unity, is expected initially to increase Trans-Pacific lit cable capacity by about 20 percent, with the potential to add up to 7.68 Terabits per second of bandwidth across the Pacific. The name Unity was chosen to signify a new type of consortium, born out of potentially competing systems, to emerge as a system within a system, offering ownership and management of individual fiber pairs. Rumors that Google would join the consortium had originally surfaced in September last year but the company had declined to confirm or deny the news."

Comments

Open access for all

[The Ancients]

This coupled with Google's open access ideas for wireless in the US could be a very good thing. Although, having cheaper bandwidth for all will benefit Google as well, of course. As they build and absorb other companies, the bandwidth requirements of their product range is ever increasing.

anchors

[Corpuscavernosa]

let's watch out for those stray anchors people.

Re:how many strands

[mrxak]

Well, it's still 7 Tbits more than there used to be.

Re:how many strands

[dintech]

Indeed.

Lets say 314 kbit/s is a ballpark figure for youtube bitrate.
That means roughly 26,000,000 more Japanese could watch the latest lonelygirl15 installment at once.

Also it's roughly 36 Mbit/s for blu-ray quality content.
That means roughly 210,000 more Americans all at once could watch as much HD quality tentacle related entertainment as they wanted.

Of course if you half those numbers they could share. This could be the beginnings of a great cultural enlightenment for everyone involved!