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Having outgrown the capacity of telecom companies to provide bandwidth for its online applications and services, Google is buying part of an undersea cable to carry data to and from Asia.

As rumored last year, Google has now announced that it would join with five other telecom companies — Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI Corporation, Pacnet, and SingTel — to invest $300 million in the construction of a 10,000 km submarine cable.

The high-speed fiber optic trans-Pacific cable, called Unity, will have a capacity of up to 7.68 Tbps and will run between the U.S. and Japan; accommodating demand for trans-Pacific bandwidth — reported to have grown at a rate of 63.7% annually between 2002 and 2007 and expected to double biannually from 2008 through 2013.

Updates from Google: About the Unity bandwidth consortium, Global Consortium to Construct New Cable System Linking US and Japan to Meet Increasing Bandwidth Demands

Read full story: InformationWeek

Related topics: Access Providers, Broadband, Telecom