At the end of June, Google and five other members of the FASTER consortium invested $300 million to add a 60 Tbps (terabits per second) undersea fiber optic cable that will run between Japan and the US to increase connection speeds.
The company is expanding its efforts to benefit internet users across Asia with a new 26 Tbps cable (to be added to the FASTER cable) that will connect Japan and Taiwan, where Google's largest data center on the continent is located.
The company says the new fiber optic cable should help Google services like Gmail, YouTube, and BigQuery load get delivered faster to users in the region.
Yan Tang, Google's Network Resource Regional Lead for Asia-Pacific, noted that "reliability and consistency should also be improved with a faster experience, as the cable will be strategically laid outside of tsunami-prone zones, which will help prevent network outages related to natural disasters."
According to the company, the speed of its latest cable will be enough to allow Taiwan's 23.5 million people to send a selfie to people in Japan every 15 seconds.
This number amounts to 138 billion selfies per day.
