Six companies have signed an agreement to construct a new ultra high-speed submarine cable system linking the United States to Japan. The construction of the new trans–Pacific infrastructure, which is named Unity, will cost an estimated USD 300 million. The carriers involved in the project are SingTel, Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, Google, KDDI and Pacnet. The cable system will link Chikura in Japan directly to Los Angeles in the US and is expected to be ready for service in the first quarter of 2010. The cable will use DWDM technology and will support up to 960 Gbps per fibre-optic pair with a maximum of eight fibre pairs. Unity will have a potential design capacity of 7.68 Tbps. Pacnet is the single largest investor in Unity and will control two of the five fibre pairs in the cable system. NEC and Tyco Telecommunications have been jointly awarded the contract to implement this project.
