April 22, 2025

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Google Announces Private New Subsea Cable Linking UK and US

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“Google is not a telco and is not in the organization of selling capacity”

Google these days unveiled ideas for a new personal six,three hundred subsea cable linking the British isles and US, with a branch to Spain — to be concluded by 2022.

The “Grace Hopper” cable will be geared up with sixteen fibre pairs, which Google described as a “significant upgrade” to present-day internet infrastructure connecting the US with Europe. It will have a substantial 340-350 Tbps ability.

Google dubbed it the first important new immediate link among the US and British isles given that 2003. (The US and Spain were being connected by the two hundred Tbps MAREA cable in 2018: a joint job among Facebook (twenty five{79e59ee6e2f5cf570628ed7ac4055bef3419265de010b59461d891d43fac5627}), Microsoft (twenty five{79e59ee6e2f5cf570628ed7ac4055bef3419265de010b59461d891d43fac5627}), and Spain’s Telefónica (fifty{79e59ee6e2f5cf570628ed7ac4055bef3419265de010b59461d891d43fac5627})

The cable will be one hundred{79e59ee6e2f5cf570628ed7ac4055bef3419265de010b59461d891d43fac5627} owned by Google.

Other people hoping for ability may possibly be out of luck: “Google is not a telco and is not in the organization of selling capacity”, the corporation sniffed when asked by Computer Business Assessment: “The ability is specified generally for use by Google’s internal merchandise and providers this kind of as Meet up with, Gmail, Lookup and for Google Cloud customers”,

The corporation added: “We do, on the other hand, share ability with other exterior associates on a situation by situation basis”. The cable is staying produced and laid by switch-critical SubCom. (Google declined to expose a Capex figure, when asked).

A SubCom animation exhibiting how subsea laying is accomplished.

The corporation described the ability as “equivalent to roughly 17.five million individuals streaming 4K videos concurrently”.

Google claimed it will be equipped to dynamically route fibre pairs among the US, British isles and Spain, employing new switching technologies that will make it possible for it to mitigate the influence of any outages: “Google and SubCom engineers collaborated on incorporating this revolutionary switching architecture into the system. Grace Hopper is the world’s first submarine cable to use this technologies,” the two claimed.

Grace Hopper joins Google’s other personal subsea cables, Curie, Dunant and Equiano.

The cable is named for personal computer science pioneer Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (1906–1992), best known for her perform on a person of the first linkers (compilers), which was essential in the advancement of the COBOL programming language.

See also: Africa to be Ringed by 23,000-Mile Subsea Cable – “2Africa” to Triple Continent’s Subsea Community Potential