February 26, 2008
KDDI recently executed agreements with Bharti Airtel Limited, Global Transit, Google, Pacnet, and SingTel for joint construction of a high-bandwidth subsea fiber optic cable linking Japan and the United States, named 'Unity.' Unity is scheduled to start operation in 4Q 2009 (January - March 2010).
The Unity cable system, approximately 10,000 kilometer (km) long in total, will link Japan and the United States directly. By using the latest DWDM [1] technology, Unity's capacity can be increased potentially to 7.68 Tbps (equivalent to about 1.28 million phone lines) [2], in line with the rapid increase in Japan - US Internet traffic and demand for broadband business-to-business communications. In addition, Unity will help to boost Japan's position as a communications hub by meeting the demand for Asia-US communication, through seamless inter-connection in Japan with Asian fiber-optic submarine cables such as APCN2.
KDDI has acquired scalable capacity of up to 480 Gbps, allowing it to provide even more reliable services to meet communications demand in the Asia-Pacific region, for which increasing growth is expected.
