A consortium of six prominent telecom and content service providers – Amazon, Facebook, PLDT, NTT Communications, PCCW Global, and SoftBank – have signed an agreement to build a new transpacific submarine cable system connecting Japan, the Philippines and the United States.

Undersea communications specialist TE SubCom, a subsidiary of TE Connectivity, has been awarded the supply contract to build the system.

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) and six partners have established a new world record of 118.5Tb/s for the largest transmission capacity achieved over an optical fibre of standard dimensions.

Though the optical fibre had the same diameter as standard singlemode fibre, its structure was not standard. The design contained four cores (light paths) running along the fibre’s length.