Google on announced it is building a new private subsea cable to link the US with other parts of the world.
Google is partnering with subsea cable provider SubCom on the project, which is named Grace Hopper after the American computer scientist by the same name. Hopper, who died in 1992, was a pioneer in the field of computer programming. She is credited with creating one of the first compilers, which directly led to the development of the COBOL programming language.
The cable, named Grace Hopper, is the fourth Google-owned pipe after Curie (SF to Chile via Panama), Dunant (Virginia Beach to France) and Equiano (Lisbon to Cape Town via Lagos). It’s designed to bolster the forthcoming rollout of Google Cloud in Spain, as well as improve connectivity between the US and Europe.
The undersea cable will feature 16 fiber pairs (32 fibers) and provide Google with a direct route to the UK and Spain. According to the tech giant, it’ll be the first submarine cable to implement optical fiber switching technology, allowing them to better route traffic during outages.
Nestled inside the line is 32 fibers packing optical fiber switching that, Google says, will improve reliability and greater redundancy to prevent outages. The contract to lay the pipe was signed earlier this year, and Google is expecting it to come online at some point in 2022.
