Trans-Pacific Deep-Sea Fiber Optic Network DeepLink Goes Live: Tokyo to Los Angeles Bandwidth Increased 10x, Latency Reduced 40%

Trans-Pacific Deep-Sea Fiber Optic Network DeepLink Goes Live: Tokyo to Los Angeles Bandwidth Increased 10x, Latency Reduced 40%

The DeepLink trans-Pacific submarine fiber optic network, jointly built by Google and Japan's NTT, officially went into operation on October 9. The network uses next-generation hollow-core fiber technology, where optical signals propagate through an air core rather than a traditional glass core, increasing single-fiber bandwidth from Tokyo to Los Angeles to 800 Tbps — 10 times that of traditional submarine cables.

Another advantage of hollow-core fiber is reduced latency — light travels approximately 47% faster in air than in glass, reducing the one-way latency from Tokyo to Los Angeles from 65 milliseconds to 38 milliseconds. This has significant implications for latency-sensitive applications such as high-frequency trading, remote surgery, and cloud gaming.

DeepLink spans 9,800 kilometers with 16 fiber pairs deployed, requiring a total investment of $2.8 billion. Google stated it will prioritize bandwidth services for Google Cloud customers, with remaining capacity to be opened to other cloud service providers.