Facebook, Google Join Hands Building Subsea Cable Infrastructure in Asia-Pacific

• 17 August 2021
• Construction Focus
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Two Silicon Valley giants – Google and Facebook – announced their cooperation in building a new subsea cable system by 2024 to improve internet connectivity across the Asia-Pacific region, reported The Straits Times on Monday 16 August.

Known as Apricot, this large-scale infrastructure project will link Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Guam, the Philippines, and Indonesia. It will help serve the growing demand for broadband access and 5G wireless connectivity.

In March, the company announced two new trans-Pacific subsea cables connecting Singapore to the United States West Coast, Bifrost and Echo, with Google participating in the latter.

The Echo and Apricot cables are complementary submarine systems, Google said in a blog post, and will improve the resilience of Google Cloud and the company’s other digital services.

The new fibre-optic link spanning the Asia-Pacific has an initial design capacity of more than 190 terabits per second, according to Facebook.

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