Search engine king Google Inc. has joined other companies to lay a new data cable between the United States and Japan. Five other telecommunications companies are involved in the bold project, which will eventually see a new 6,200 mile undersea fiber optic cable installed on Pacific's bottom.

A consortium was formed, Unity, which comprises Google, Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI Corp, Pacnet, and Singapore Telecommunications. The new data link will enable telecommunications companies to keep up with surging Internet traffic between the United States and Asia.

"The Unity cable system allows the members of the consortium to provide the increased capacity needed as more applications and services migrate online," said Jayne Stowell, a spokesman for the 6-company consortium.

Unity has chosen NEC Corporation and Tyco Telecommunications to lay the cable, with a projected finalization date sometime in 2010. The fiber optic link will cost around $300 million. Three other similar trans-Pacific cables are being constructed or planned. They include a cable sponsored by Verizon, which should begin operating later this year, and another backed by a consortium that includes AT&T and telecommunications companies in Southeast Asia.

The new Google-backed Unity cable will run along the ocean floor from Los Angeles to Chikura, Japan. It will be laid as deep as 2,000 feet below the ocean surface. In Japan the fiber optic connection will connect into other networks. Pacnet will reportedly control two of the five fiber pairs in the new cable, which could potentially add more than 7 terabytes per second of bandwidth.

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