New Delhi (NVI): Google has announced that it intends to set up a new undersea fiber-optic cable between the US, the UK, and Spain as part of an effort to improve its services.
The cable — named Grace Hopper after the American computer programming pioneer — will provide better resilience for the network that underpins Google’s consumer and enterprise products.
This will be one of the first new fiber lines linking the US and the UK since 2003 and further entrenches the tech giant in global internet infrastructure.
The new subsea cable will have landing points will be one of the first new fiber lines linking the US and the UK since 2003 and further entrenches the tech giant in global internet infrastructure.
Subsea cables serve as the critical plumbing of the internet, and are responsible for carrying roughly 98pc of internet traffic around the world at almost the speed of light with hundreds of thousands of miles of cables laid down on the seafloor.
In addition to this, Grace Hopper, will join Google’s various other private subsea cables like Curie between the US and South America, Dunant between the US and France and Equiano between Europe and Africa, and also marks Google’s first cable to Spain and its first private subsea cable route to the UK.
The new cable is scheduled to go online in 2022 and will be built by SubCom, which Google also contracted for work on its Dunant and Curie cables, according to media reports.
The cable will feature 16 fiber pairs, which is a pretty standard number, but as the Google team stresses, it will be the first to use a new switching architecture the company developed in cooperation with SubCom. This new system is meant to provide increased reliability and to enable the company to better move traffic around outages.
-CHK
