Unity is a Trans-Pacific

submarine communications cable A submarine communications cable is a cable laid on the sea bed between land-based stations to carry telecommunication signals across stretches of ocean and sea. The first submarine communications cables laid beginning in the 1850s carried te ...

between Japan and the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., federal district, five ma ...

that was completed in April 2010. Unity comprises a 10,000 km linear cable system with a "multi-

terabit The bit is the most basic unit of information in computing and digital communications. The name is a portmanteau of binary digit. The bit represents a logical state with one of two possible values. These values are most commonly represente ...

" capacity of up to 7.68 Tbit/s. Construction of the cable was funded by a consortium formed in February 2008 comprising

Bharti Airtel Bharti Airtel Limited, commonly known as ( d/b/a) Airtel, is an Indian multinational telecommunications services company based in New Delhi. It operates in 18 countries across South Asia and Africa, as well as the Channel Islands. Curr ...

, Global Transit,

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

, KDDI Corporation, Pacnet and

SingTel Singapore Telecommunications Limited, commonly known as Singtel, is a Singaporean telecommunications conglomerate and one of the four major telcos operating in the country. The company is the largest mobile network operator in Singapore with ...

.Grahame Lynch
Google plans new undersea "Unity" cable across Pacific
." '' CommsDay.com.'' September 21, 2007. Retrieved on September 21, 2007. Unity's installation cost around US$300 million, and its completion increased Trans-Pacific cable capacity by around 20 per cent.

History

In February 2008 a consortium comprising Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, Google, KDDI Corporation, Pacnet and SingTel announced that they had executed agreements to build a high-bandwidth subsea fiber optic cable linking the United States and Japan, with an estimated construction cost of US$300 million. A signing ceremony was held in Tokyo on February 23, 2008 at which the Unity consortium contracted

NEC Corporation is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo. The company was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited, before rebranding in 1983 as NEC. It provides IT and network soluti ...

and

Tyco Telecommunications Tyco may refer to: * Tyco International, a diversified industrial conglomerate ** TE Connectivity, formerly Tyco Electronics, a former segment of Tyco International ** Tyco Solarlok, a type of electrical connector widely known as "the Tyco connecto ...

to construct and install the system. NEC and Tyco began work on the project in June 2008. The cable reached Japan in November 2009. Testing of the cable was completed, and it became ready for service, in April 2010.

Specifications

Unity is a 10,000 kilometer Trans-Pacific cable between Chikura, located off the coast near Tokyo, and Los Angeles and other network points of presence on the West Coast of the United States. At Chikura, Unity is connected to other cable systems. The new five fiber pair cable system has five fiber pairs, with each fiber pair capable of carrying up to 960 gigabits per second (Gbit/s). By having a high fiber count, Unity is able to offer more capacity at lower unit costs. Unity is expected to initially increase Trans-Pacific lit cable capacity by about 20 percent, with the potential to add up to 7.68 terabits per second (Tbit/s) of bandwidth across the Pacific.

Media response

Writing in ''The New York Times'' in September 2007, Saul Hansell said of Google's anticipated involvement in Unity that: "Google may be the ultimate do-it-yourself company. From the start, Google's sense of its own engineering superiority, combined with a tightwad sensibility, led it to build its own servers. It writes its own operating systems. It is now threatening to buy wireless carrier spectrum and it is getting ready to hire ships that will lay a data communications cable across the Pacific..."

References

External links

* http://www.submarinecablemap.com/#/submarine-cable/unityeac-pacific {{KDDI KDDI Google Submarine communications cables in the Pacific Ocean Japan–United States relations 2010 establishments in California 2010 establishments in Japan

History

Specifications

Media response

See also

References

External links