Equinix supports FASTER cable system in North America  

Equinix has announced support for the new FASTER sub-sea cable system which has the largest design capacity ever built on the trans-Pacific route – one of the longest routes in the world. The cable will be backhauled in to four of Equinix’s International Business Exchange (IBX®) data centers on the West Coast of the United States including Silicon Valley, Los Angeles and Seattle, to Chikura and Shima in Japan.

In May 2015, Cisco released its VNI Global IP Traffic Forecast, 2014 – 2019. Global highlights from the updated study include the following projections:
o By 2019, there will be nearly 3.9 billion global Internet users (more than 51 percent of the world’s population), up from 2.8 billion in 2014
o By 2019, there will be 24 billion networked devices and connections globally, up from 14 billion in 2014
o Globally, the average fixed broadband connection speed will increase 2.2-fold, from 20.3 Mbps in 2014 to 42.5 Mbps by 2019
o Globally, IP video will represent 80 percent of all traffic by 2019, up from 67 percent in 2014.

Networks are an essential part of business, education, government, and home communications. Many residential, business, and mobile IP networking trends are being driven largely by a combination of video, social networking, and advanced collaboration applications, termed visual networking. To remain competitive, network operators are expanding their infrastructures to meet demand for these new services—and are turning to colocation data centers that not only offer all the network-to-network connectivity of a telehouse, but also act as aggregation points for concentrations of customers in network-centric industries.

FASTER will feature the latest high-quality 6-fiber-pair cable and optical transmission technologies, with an initial design capacity of 60Tb/s (100Gb/s x 100 wavelengths x 6 fiber-pairs). This new cable system will be landed at Chikura and Shima in Japan and will feature seamless connectivity to many neighboring cable systems to extend the capacity beyond Japan to other Asian locations.

The FASTER cable system has the largest design capacity ever built on the Trans-Pacific route, which is one of the longest routes in the world. By connecting to Equinix data centers, FASTER and its users can leverage Equinix’s mature business ecosystems and interconnection platform – Platform Equinix™ – which connects more than 6,300 global businesses in 33 markets around the globe.

Global businesses are increasingly using more capacity to run IT operations including cloud-based applications. In both the Silicon Valley and Seattle, Equinix offers direct connectivity to leading cloud service providers including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform via the Equinix Cloud Exchange™. These dedicated, private connections reduce network costs and provide higher, more consistent network performance than Internet-based connections for enterprise customers looking to build hybrid clouds.

Earlier this year Equinix announced that it is boosting interconnection capacity by opening new data centers on four continents including North America and Asia. By providing this increased capacity, Equinix expands its role in advancing the digital economy's interconnected era, in which businesses are demanding increasing levels of interconnection to accelerate business performance.

The FASTER consortium is comprised of six parties, including China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, Google, KDDI and Singtel. The system is expected to begin operating during the second quarter of 2016.