After Google and Meta agreed to restrict the “access to information and infrastructure” of the Chinese company Pacific Light Data Communications Co Ltd, the US security agency recommended that the FCC approve the opening of a large submarine cable from the US to the Asia-Pacific region.
Pacific Cable Network (programmable logic controller) Composed of 11,806 kilometers of optical fiber with a capacity of 120Tbps, which will make it the highest-capacity trans-Pacific route. Google stated at the beginning of the project that PLCN will “bring lower latency, higher security and greater bandwidth to Google users in the Asia-Pacific region.”
Google, Meta and the Chinese company Pacific Light Data Communications Co Ltd (PLDC) are all part of the PLCN Cable Alliance.
In a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice last week, state agencies explained their preventive measures Due to “continuous effort” Was “acquired sensitive personal data of millions of Americans” by China.
The U.S. Department of Justice, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—all members of the U.S. Telecommunications and Services Department’s Foreign Participation Evaluation Committee (the department ridiculously named itself Team Telecom)—representing that Meta and Google have agreed to a security agreement , Paving the way for these agencies to recommend that the FCC grant them a license to operate a cable that contains 6 pairs of optical fibers that will handle the growing Internet data traffic between the Asia-Pacific region and the United States.
PLCN is currently logged in In Bale Bay in the Philippines, Toucheng in Taiwan and El Segundo in California on the west coast of the United States.
This submarine cable was first announced in 2016 and will be the first ever direct connection from Hong Kong to the United States, but the consortium dropped an application Cables landed near the eastern part of the Pearl River Delta in August 2020.
PLDC is the largest supporter of the project. After the company was sold by the real estate giant Wei Junkang to Beijing-based broadband provider Dr. Peng Telemedia Group in 2017, the United States expressed concern that it might be more susceptible to China’s influence. Peng has ties to Chinese government companies and Huawei, and is currently fighting the United States for several years. In May 2019, the United States included him on the Entity List of the Department of Commerce, restricting the export of hardware and software from the United States to designated organizations. Unless explicitly approved.
Google and Facebook last year [PDF] The FCC is required to allow the opening of the PLCN part between the United States, the Philippines and Taiwan, which means that its Hong Kong part will be dormant. Friday’s statement means that the Fed will agree.
“These agreements allow Google and Meta to take advantage of critical additional cable capacity while protecting the privacy and safety of Americans through provisions that reflect the current threat environment,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen, National Security Division, Department of Justice, said Friday. .
The US security agency stated (among other things, unspecified content) that the two have agreed to “seek diversification of Asian interconnection points, including but not limited to Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore, and Vietnam”.
Meta tell Register“We are encouraged by the government’s proposal to approve our use of the PLCN submarine cable system to connect the United States and the Philippines.
“This cable system increases the capacity of the Internet between the two countries…Our approach is to build the most advanced and secure submarine cables in which all data passing through them is protected by advanced encryption.” ®
