New Pacific Ocean cable

The BBC has an article about the latest from Google:

Google and five other large companies are teaming up to build a cable under the Pacific Ocean that will deliver incredibly fast internet speeds. The cable, dubbed Faster, will connect the US with Japan and cost about three hundred million dollars, the consortium said. The trans-Pacific fibre cable would deliver speeds of sixty terabytes per second, enough to send more than two thousand uncompressed HD films a second. The cable will be operational by 2016.
Google is working with a host of Asian telecoms giants: China Mobile, China Telecom, Global Transit, KDDI, and SingTel.
"Faster is one of a few hundred submarine telecommunications cables connecting various parts of the world," said Woohyong Choi, chairman of the consortium's executive committee. "These cables collectively form an important infrastructure that helps run global internet and communications. The Faster cable system has the largest design capacity ever built on the trans-Pacific route, which is one of the longest routes in the world."
The cable will connect Chikura and Shima in Japan to the major hubs on the West Coast of the US (photo, top): Los Angeles and San Francisco in California, Portland in Oregon, and Seattle in Washington.
Submarine cables are integral to the structure of how the world wide web works. In 2008, communications between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia were seriously disrupted after submarine cables were severed near the Alexandria cable station in Egypt. Sixty-five percent of net traffic to India was down at the time.
And KDDI, Japan's second-largest telecoms operator, had to do extensive work to repair undersea cables damaged in the massive 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
Google already offers high-speed internet access directly in the US through its Fiber service, with speeds of one gig per second in cities like Austin, Texas, and Kansas City, Kansas.
But the speeds from the new Faster cable far surpass anything consumers can access in most of the US and Europe, though internet speeds are generally much faster in Asia; South Korea wants to see citizens equipped with one gig per second connections by 2017, for example.
The fastest widely-available speed of broadband in the UK is 152mbps. There are a thousand megabits in one gigabit and a thousand gigabits in one terabit of data transmitted.

Rico says you remember when countries used to do this? (The lower image is of the Great Eastern laying the 1866 Atlantic submarine cable.)