FASTER

Overview

FASTER is a transpacific submarine cable system connecting Oregon on the United States west coast with landing points in Japan and Taiwan. It entered service in 2016, carrying a design capacity of 60 Tbit/s — a figure that placed it among the highest-capacity systems on the Pacific corridor at the time of its completion.

Route and Connectivity

The cable's Oregon landing anchors it to one of North America's primary west-coast cable hubs, a geography well-suited to onward connectivity into the continental United States. From there, FASTER extends across the North Pacific to Japan and Taiwan, two of the Asia-Pacific region's most strategically significant internet exchange points. Japan functions as a major transit hub for traffic moving across Asia, while Taiwan sits at the centre of a dense cluster of regional cable connections. Together, these endpoints make FASTER a direct conduit for data moving between North America and the broader East and Southeast Asian internet ecosystem.

Construction

NEC supplied and built the system. The Japanese manufacturer has a long history on the Pacific, and its involvement in FASTER reflects the established pattern of specialist marine contractors delivering turnkey cable systems for consortia operating on high-demand routes.

Capacity and Regional Context

With 60 Tbit/s of design capacity, FASTER was engineered to address the sustained growth in transpacific bandwidth demand driven by cloud services, video streaming and enterprise traffic. The North Pacific remains one of the world's busiest submarine cable corridors, served by multiple systems, and FASTER contributes substantial throughput to that shared infrastructure. Its dual landfall in Japan and Taiwan also provides a degree of geographic diversity, distributing traffic across two distinct national networks rather than concentrating it at a single Asian terminus.