Good News Asia: Google & Facebook is building super high-speed undersea cable connecting Asia to LA.

Good News Asia: Google & Facebook is building super high-speed undersea cable connecting Asia to LA.

Source: Google

A new 120 Tbps undersea cable will expand their reach on the continent.

Google and Facebook are working together to lay a nearly 8,000-mile cable between Los Angeles and Hong Kong.

Construction of the new cable will begin this year, and it should come online in 2018.

It gives the PLCN enough capacity for 80 million people in Hong Kong to have an HD video call with Los Angeles at the same time. It also gives Google Cloud Platform -- which powers services like Spotify and part of iCloud -- the largest network backbone of any public cloud provider. On a user-facing level, the new cable will speed up responsiveness in Google's G Suite apps for users in the Asia-Pacific region, but the wider implication is that a faster connection will give both companies a stronger foothold on the continent and open doors into more developing countries.

The new cable should allow Google and Facebook to offer faster and more reliable service to visitors on the other side of the Pacific. The companies will likely each get a certain chunk of the cable’s total capacity and lease out the remaining space to others; but so far, they haven’t announced the specifics.