ViaWest, a provider of hybrid IT solutions offering cloud, network, colocation services and security solutions and a subsidiary of Shaw Communications, announced that it to begin offering access to the New Cross Pacific (NCP) subsea cable, which is claimed to be the fastest low-latency, optical cable between the U.S. and Asia.
Directly terminating in ViaWest's Brookwood data centre in Hillsboro, Oregon, the high capacity subsea cable is designed to significantly reduce the latency between the U.S. and Asia, delivering up to 80 Tbit/s capacity between the Northwestern U.S. and East Asia to help improve access to the region that encompasses China, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea.
The 13,000 km NCP cable is intended to enable new bandwidth-intensive services between the U.S. and Asia that businesses increasingly demand. The cable system is owned by a consortium of seven companies, including a large, unnamed U.S.-based company and six Asian telecom providers, namely Chunghwa Telecom, KT of Korea, China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom.
With the U.S. connection point terminating at the ViaWest Brookwood data centre, the cable will utilise the latest optical amplifier technology to deliver high performance and reliability for the transmission of multiple wavelength channels on multiple fibre pairs to mainland China, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan.
The ViaWest Brookwood facility offers over 140,000 sq feet of capacity for colocation, cloud computing and other data centre services and supports private, public and hybrid cloud solutions, including a dedicated cloud node in the Brookwood facility, as well providing managed bandwidth network services. ViaWest operates 30 North American data centres and multiple cloud nodes.
* In late 2016, ViaWest announced an agreement providing connectivity to the optical cables terminating at its Hillsboro data centres with CoastCom, a fibre based service provider on the Oregon Coast and a division of Wave Broadband. The agreement provided ViaWest with shared network access pathways with other Hillsboro-area data centres.
ViaWest noted at the time that CoastCom was operating a submarine cable landing station in Pacific City, and was the owner and operator of redundant path diverse terrestrial fibre backhaul routes to Hillsboro, and had built a fibre ring connecting six data centres in the Hillsboro area to the fibre network.
* In May 2015, TE SubCom announced that it had commenced construction of the NCP cable system with consortium members China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Chunghwa Telecom, KT, Microsoft, SoftBank Mobile. In January 2017, it was reported that the FCC had granted the cable landing license for the New Pacific Cross (NCP) submarine cable system.
