NEC Corporation has been selected to build a recently announced trans-Pacific subsea cable, JUNO, that will connect California in the U.S. with two sites in Japan.

A press release said that the system—approximately 10,000 km long—will be built by Seren Juno Network Co. (Seren), a company established by NTT Ltd. Japan Corporation; Mitsui & Co., Ltd.; PC Landing Corp.; and JA Mitsui Leasing, Ltd. It will land in Japan in the Chiba Prefecture, located on Japan’s eastern Pacific coast to the east of Tokyo, part of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the Mie Prefecture, within the Kansai region on Japan’s main island of Honshu.

Subsea cable has typically deployed a maximum of 16 fiber pairs, but using NEC’s newly developed energy efficient repeaters and its SDM (Space Division Multiplexing) technology, the system will be able to adapt as many as 20 fiber pairs for the first time in a trans-Pacific subsea fiber-optic cable. The cable is expected to provide a maximum capacity of 350 Tbps, the largest among any existing cable system between the U.S. and Japan.

“With the rapid growth of the global digital economy and an increasing demand for cloud solutions and lower latency, the undersea internet cable sector is quickly becoming more critical to global internet infrastructure,” said Takanobu Maeda, president and CEO of NTT Ltd. Japan Corporation. “This new subsea cable is the latest joint effort NTT has led in a long and proud history of providing reliable global internet infrastructure.”

The JUNO cable will support the strong demand for communications, including the spread of 5G across Asia and North America. By providing communication routes from two separate Japanese locations to the U.S., the system will be highly resilient to natural disasters in the coastal areas of Japan. The system is also designed to remotely alter the bandwidth of each route, enabling it to respond flexibly to customer business needs and changes.

NEC, a supplier of submarine cable systems for more than 50 years, notes that it has built more than 300,000 km of cable. It also makes and installs repeaters, does surveys and route designs, training and delivery testing. Its OCC Corporation subsidiary manufactures subsea optical cables able to be used at ocean depths beyond 8,000 meters.