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Google and Facebook Are Building the Fastest Trans-Pacific Cable Yet (techcrunch.com)
Google and Facebook are working together to lay a nearly 8,000-mile fiber-optic cable between Los Angeles and Hong Kong. The cable will have a bandwidth of 120 terabits per second, Google said, adding that this makes it the highest-capacity route between the United States and Asia. TechCrunch adds: Once the new 12,800 km cable is at full capacity, it'll be the highest-capacity trans-Pacific cable yet. Until now, that record was held by the FASTER cable, which Google also has a stake in. Google tells TechCrunch that all parties participating in building the cable will have their own portion of the cable and that the company will have its own fiber pair to keep its own traffic private. The new cable will become the sixth submarine cable that Google has a stake in (the others are Unity, SJC, FASTER, MONET and Tannat). While it may seem unusual for Google to partner with Facebook on this kind of project, submarine cables often feature these kind of partnerships. Facebook and Microsoft recently teamed up to build a trans-Atlantic cable, for example, which at 160 Tbps is even faster than the Pacific Light cable (but also only half as long). Amazon, too, is starting to invest in its own submarine cables, but so far, the company has not partner with other industry giants to do so.
The length of the cable is 12,800 km.
The speed of light is 300,000 km/sec.
The velocity factor of fiber is about 68%.
The data rate of the cable is 120e12 bits/sec.
The amount of time that the data stays in the cable is 12,800 km / (300,000 km/sec * 0.68) = 62.7 milliseconds. Multiplying that by the data rate of 120e12 bits per second yields about eight terabits or one terabyte. That is the amount of data "stored" in the cable, at any instant, during transit.
It's not much of an addition to the Google/Facebook data cosmoplex, but it is solid state, liquid cooled, highly distributed and largely immune from fires and small meteor strikes.