Equinix announced support for the new FASTER subsea cable system which runs on the trans-Pacific route, connecting United States and Japan.

The cable will be backhauled into four of Equinix’s International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers on the West Coast of the United States including Silicon Valley, Los Angeles and Seattle, to Chikura and Shima in Japan.

The FASTER will feature 6-fiber-pair cable and optical transmission technologies, with an initial design capacity of 60Tb/s (100Gb/s x 100 wavelengths x 6 fiber-pairs).

The new cable will feature connectivity to neighboring cable systems to extend the capacity beyond Japan to other Asian locations.

Jim Poole, vice president, global service providers, Equinix commented: “Equinix remains committed to accelerating business performance by connecting companies to their customers, employees and partners inside the world’s most interconnected data centers. We believe that the FASTER cable system will increase the opportunity for interconnection between North America and Asia and we are excited to be supporting this new venture.”

The FASTER consortium is comprised of six parties, including China Mobile International, China Telecom Global, Global Transit, Google, KDDI and Singtel.

The system is expected to be operational during the second quarter of 2016.