Google Announces Private New Subsea Cable Linking UK and US
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“Google is not a telco and is not in the business enterprise of promoting capacity”
Google currently exposed ideas for a new non-public six,300 subsea cable linking the United kingdom and US, with a branch to Spain — to be done by 2022.
The “Grace Hopper” cable will be outfitted with 16 fibre pairs, which Google described as a “significant upgrade” to present world-wide-web infrastructure connecting the US with Europe. It will have a sizeable 340-350 Tbps capability.
Google dubbed it the very first important new immediate hyperlink between the US and United kingdom because 2003. (The US and Spain were linked by the two hundred Tbps MAREA cable in 2018: a joint task between Facebook (twenty five%), Microsoft (twenty five%), and Spain’s Telefónica (50%)
The cable will be a hundred% owned by Google.
Some others hoping for capability may be out of luck: “Google is not a telco and is not in the business enterprise of promoting capacity”, the enterprise sniffed when requested by Computer Business enterprise Overview: “The capability is selected largely for use by Google’s internal products and solutions and expert services this kind of as Meet, Gmail, Lookup and for Google Cloud customers”,
The enterprise extra: “We do, nevertheless, share capability with other external companions on a circumstance by circumstance basis”. The cable is remaining made and laid by switch-important SubCom. (Google declined to expose a Capex determine, when requested).
A SubCom animation demonstrating how subsea laying is carried out.
The enterprise described the capability as “equivalent to somewhere around seventeen.five million folks streaming 4K videos concurrently”.
Google reported it will be equipped to dynamically route fibre pairs between the US, United kingdom and Spain, working with new switching technological innovation that will allow for it to mitigate the influence of any outages: “Google and SubCom engineers collaborated on incorporating this impressive switching architecture into the program. Grace Hopper is the world’s very first submarine cable to use this technological innovation,” the two reported.
Grace Hopper joins Google’s other non-public subsea cables, Curie, Dunant and Equiano.
The cable is named for pc science pioneer Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (1906–1992), best known for her get the job done on one of the very first linkers (compilers), which was critical in the progress of the COBOL programming language.
