Facebook will lay submarine cable in Asia

Following Google’s example, Facebook also decided to invest in communication channels. The social network has joined a consortium that intends to build the fastest fiber network in the Asian region: Asia Pacific Gateway (APG). Typically, Facebook is the only American company among project investors.

The APG fiber network extends from Malaysia to Japan, with branches to dozens of major cities in Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Taiwan and South Korea.



The network is planned to be commissioned in 2014. At first, it will operate on 40-gigabit channels and provide a total throughput of 55 Tbit / s, but in the future the channels will upgrade to 100 Gbit / s, so that the total throughput will be 137 Tbit / s.

Today, APG's investment capacity is estimated at $ 450 million, making it one of the most expensive submarine cable networks in the world. Investors include the largest telecommunications companies China Telecom and China Unicom. It is no secret that this project is needed primarily by China, because today almost all traffic from the USA to Asia goes either through Japan or through Singapore.

In general, Internet companies rarely invest in telecommunications infrastructure, although this should be logical. Google is perhaps the only exception. It is known that the search system owns extensive sections of trunk communication channels, and also participated in the laying of the Unity trans-Pacific submarine cablebetween the US and Japan (project cost $ 300 million), and now Google is part of another consortium that is laying an undersea fiber network in Asia.