Google has revealed that it will fund a submarine cable connecting Japan and Canada.
The advertising giant says the new cable — called Topaz — will be the first to take that route, and the first trans-Pacific cable to land in Canada.
The Japanese cable landing stations are located in Mie and Ibaraki Prefectures, both on the main island of Honshu. Canadian landings will be at Port Alberni on Vancouver Island and in the city of Vancouver (which is not on Vancouver Island).
Google predicted that the cable should be operational by 2023 and will “enable low-latency access to Search, Gmail and YouTube, Google Cloud and other Google services, as well as increase capacity to the region for a variety of network operators in both Japan and Japan.” “. and Canada.”
Those operators may well be the unnamed “local partners in Japan and Canada” that Google says are helping build the cable.
It’s also worth considering the mention of low-latency access to Google services. While both Japan and Canada are well equipped with data centers, Google’s list of facilities it uses to run its non-cloud services omits both countries. The closest Google data center to Japanese users is in Taiwan, a branch in Singapore is closer than Canada, and the nearby waters are crossed by many undersea cables. Traffic from Canadian users faces very short trips to 13 Google data centers in the US. Vancouver users can connect to Oregon bit barns.
Perhaps the reason for the low latency lies in the fact that the 16 fiber pairs used in the cable will have a total capacity of 240 terabits per second.
The cable also uses Wavelength Selective Switch (WSS) technology that Meta plans to use on the Apricot cable connecting several Southeast Asian countries.
Google has described WSS as “an efficient and software-defined way to distribute spectrum on a fiber pair for routing flexibility and advanced resiliency.”
Another resilience measure is for Google to exchange fiber pairs with partners that operate nearby cables — a practice cable operators use to avoid the impact of network problems on the physical layer.
