[ChuckMcM]

If you read the article you would see that they are one of a number of partners. The project costs several billion US$. By 'buying in' like this you are given a dedicated portion of the bandwidth to use.

[notatoad]

The NEC press release says the total amount of investment across six different companies is approximately $300mm

[ChuckMcM]

Facscinating, so now I'm completely confused. If they can pull this cable for 300M$US total that is a huge improvement in costs from previous efforts. Now I feel compelled to track down what changed that made this an order of magnitude less costly to do.

EDIT: this link http://submarinenetworks.com/systems/trans-pacific/unity informs me that I am completely wrong on the costs. Apparently it is really "only" 300M$ to lay a cable from here to there.

[tinalumfoil]

You're right. The press release [0] does say "The total amount of investment for the FASTER system is estimated to be approximately USD $300 million". That would, however, make the title of this article wrong.

I'm surprised Techcrunch made that big a mistake in their reporting.

[0] http://www.nec.com/en/press/201408/global_20140811_01.html

[notatoad]

no, the title is accurate. it says "Google invests in $300mm cable", not "Google invests $300mm in cable"