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Google's 'FASTER' 9000km, 60Tbps Transpacific Fiber Optics Cable Completed (9to5google.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via 9to5Google: Google and an association of telecom providers have announced that the FASTER broadband cable system that links Japan and the United States is now complete. The system is the fastest of its kind and stretches nearly 9,000 km across the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, starting in Oregon and ending in two landing spots in Japan. The association consists of Google, China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, KDDI, Singtel, and supplier NEC Corporation. The estimated construction cost of the project was $300 million in 2014. At 60 terabits per second, FASTER will help "support the expected four-fold increase in broadband traffic demand between Asia and North America." The system uses a six-fiber pair cable and the latest 100Gbps digital coherent optical transmission technology. The service is scheduled to start on June 30, 2016, and will help increase the connectivity between Google's data centers scattered around the globe.
Because you are not factoring in the cost of a repeater every 60 km. Then you have to keep those repeaters powered and they are good for about 25 years. Oh you say you can leave them turned off till they need used. We have a lot of people who buy a back up circuit, never test it or check to see that it is still usable and find out when their main circuit fail their back up is down also.
It depends what you mean by fastest. As you note we have a perfectly good word for "the time it takes for a bit to make it out the other end" - latency. Most people probably intuitively associate bandwidth with speed, though, because it's most directly relevant to what they do, which is try to transfer quantities of data. If it takes 1 minute to download a movie on one connection and 10 on another, but both are identical latency, most people will say the former is 10 times faster - because it is, for what they use it for. A gamer who has specific needs might prefer a lower-bandwidth but lower-latency (or jitter) connection, but probably wouldn't call it faster - they'd say it was lower latency because they know most people associate speed with bandwidth. Your dump truck wouldn't be called the fastest, but if the typical person had a mountain of soil they wanted moved and called up the earth-moving companies to give them a bid, the one with the biggest trucks would probably be able to bid the shortest time.
Of course, if it's a more direct routing, it may indeed be the lowest-latency link between those two points.
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