Google and Facebook’s new cable to link Japan and South-east Asia

TOKYO (BLOOMBERG) – Alphabet’s Google and Facebook announced their participation in a new subsea cable system for 2024 set to improve Internet connectivity across the Asia-Pacific region.

Dubbed Apricot, the infrastructure project will link Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Guam, the Philippines and Indonesia and help serve growing demand for broadband access and 5G wireless connectivity, Facebook said.

In March, the company announced two new trans-Pacific subsea cables connecting Singapore to the United States West Coast, Bifrost and Echo, with Google participating in the latter.

The Echo and Apricot cables are complementary submarine systems, Google said in a blog post, and will improve the resilience of Google Cloud and the company’s other digital services. The new fibre-optic link spanning the Asia-Pacific has an initial design capacity of more than 190 terabits per second, according to Facebook.

Both Silicon Valley giants have been investing in building out Internet infrastructure in the regions they see offering the highest growth potential, with Google last year announcing a US$10 billion (S$13.6 billion) spending plan to help India’s digitisation push over the next five to seven years.