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.
You're right. The press release [0] does say "The total amount of investment for the FASTER system is estimated to be approximately USD $300 million". That would, however, make the title of this article wrong.
I'm surprised Techcrunch made that big a mistake in their reporting.
EDIT: this link http://submarinenetworks.com/systems/trans-pacific/unity informs me that I am completely wrong on the costs. Apparently it is really "only" 300M$ to lay a cable from here to there.