Telecom carriers link onto $300m trans-Pacific optical fiber project

Two subsidiaries of China's top telecom carriers are joining a Google Inc-led project to build a new trans-Pacific submarine fiber optic cable system connecting Asia and North America, the companies said on Tuesday.

The $300 million project, named Faster, will significantly lift the Internet connection speed of China and other Asian nations after being put into use by mid-2016, according to a six-company consortium funding the construction work.

Two international subsidiaries of China Mobile Ltd and China Telecom Corp Ltd are partners of Faster, which has an initial design capacity of 60 terabytes a second. The connection speed is roughly 10 million times faster than a cable modem.