As it stands, there's almost twice as much bandwidth across the Atlantic as there is across the Pacific. But with new U.S. FCC approval for the first ever China-U.S. fiber link, this is all about to change.
The score right now: 5,547 to 2,726. That's the current Atlantic vs. Pacific bandwidth score in gigabits per second, according to TeleGeography. The Trans-Pacific Express "will initially provide capacity of up to 1.28 terabits per second, and the system will have a design capacity of up to 5.12Tbps to support future Internet growth and advanced applications such as video and e-commerce," writes ChinaTechNews.
Construction has been under way since September, and should be complete before the Olympics. Internet speeds in Beijing are generally pretty good in my experience, but further south in Shanghai, much of the transpacific traffic is terribly sluggish on a variety of connections. Perhaps this is a matter of higher demand there, but with the FCC's approval for the cable to land in Oregon, things should get better soon.
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