Wednesday morning a large ship, the Global Sentinel, was spotted off the coast of Hermosa Beach, floating just offshore in Santa Monica Bay. The City of Hermosa Beach announced that the ship is surveying the sea floor to examine an undersea cable that originates in Chikura, Japan and lands in Hermosa Beach, Calif.
The ship is approximately a half mile out and will be progressing seaward throughout the day, the release said. The ship is surveying the area in compliance with the Coastal Commission’s permit for the UNITY cable’s installation. The Trans-Pacific ‘Unity’ submarine cable system is almost 6,000 miles long and was installed in 2010. It was constructed at a cost upwards of $300 million and was built by the Unity telecom consortium,which is comprised of Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, Google, KDDI Corp., Pacnet, and SingTel. The construction of the cable improved trans-pacific communication and was designed to deliver up to 4.8 Terabits per second (Tbps) of bandwidth across the Pacific, with each fiber pair having a capacity of up to 960 Gigabits per second (Gbps)- an increase of cable capacity of 20 percent, a release from PACNET said in 2010. The survey is routine and is required every 18 to 24 months.
