Alphabet-owned company Google has announced that it will be laying a new subsea cable christened Grace Hopper. The path of the new cable from Google Cloud is set to connect the U.S., UK and Spain. It is to be used mainly for the purpose of carrying traffic for the company's enterprise and consumer products.
The new undersea cable is set to use some of the latest technology in the industry. It will incorporate novel optical fiber switching, making it the first submarine cable in the world to have such features. Google hopes that this will result in making Grace Hopper faster and more reliable than the rest.
Speaking about the upcoming transatlantic cable, VP of Google's global network Bikash Koley delved into the details of the project:
"Once commissioned, the Grace Hopper cable will be one of the first new cables to connect the U.S. and U.K. since 2003, increasing capacity on this busy global crossroads and powering Google services like Meet, Gmail and Google Cloud. It also marks our first investment in a private subsea cable route to the U.K., and our first-ever route to Spain. The Spanish landing point will more tightly integrate the upcoming Google Cloud region in Madrid into our global infrastructure. The Grace Hopper cable will be equipped with 16 fiber pairs (32 fibers), a significant upgrade to the internet infrastructure connecting the U.S. with Europe."
It is expected that Grace Hopper will be ready by 2022. Google has selected SubCom, an experienced company in the undersea cable industry, for the project. A contract for the cable has already been signed by the two parties.
This, of course, isn't Google's first such venture. The first privately-owned undersea cable laid down by the company was named Curie. It was announced in early 2018 and subsequently commissioned in 2019. Apart from Curie, the tech giant owns two other private cables named Dunant and Equiano.
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