With bottles of bubbly and a purification ceremony, a Google-backed undersea cable was given a warm welcome on a beach in Japan last week, a critical step in building the highest-capacity data link in the Pacific ever created.

The 9,000-kilometer FASTER cable will have a peak capacity of 60 terabytes per second (Tbps) when it starts operating next year, joining Japan with Oregon on the West Coast of the U.S.

Apart from Google, the project is backed by telecom carriers KDDI of Japan, SingTel of Singapore, Global Transit of Malaysia, China Mobile International and China Telecom Global.

At the landing site in Shima, Mie Prefecture, east of Osaka, a machine pulled the cable onto the beach from an offshore cable-laying ship while stacks of armored pipes, which shield the link from anchors near the shore, were piled nearby.

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