Facebook and Google lay 12,000 km of undersea Internet cable between 6 Asian countries

Google announced a new project to lay thousands of kilometers of undersea Internet cable connecting six East Asian countries.

The project, called Apricot, plans to lay 12,000 kilometers of cable connecting Japan, Taiwan, Guam, the Philippines, Indonesia and Singapore.

Earlier this year, Google announced the Echo submarine cable, which will connect the United States, Singapore, Guam and Indonesia. The Echo and Apricot cables are complementary submarine systems that will provide benefits through multiple paths to and from Asia, including unique routes through South Asia, ensuring significantly higher resilience for Google Cloud and digital services.

Together, they will provide businesses and startups in Asia with lower latency, higher throughput and improved resilience of connectivity between Southeast Asia, North Asia and the US.

The system is expected to become operational in 2024, it said. Apricot's capacity will be 190 Tbps.

Note that 98% of international Internet traffic is transmitted worldwide through submarine cables.

Source: google

Illustration: businessinsider