Google today announced its plans for the construction of a new submarine cable with landing points in New York in the United States and Bude, the United Kingdom and Bilbao, Spain in Europe. The new cable, named after the pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper, will join various other private submarine cables such as Curie between the United States and South America, Dunant between the United States and France and Equian between Europe and the Africa.
The new cable is slated to be online in 2022 and will be built by SubCom, which Google has also contracted for work on its Dunant and Curie cables.
Google plans to launch a new Google Cloud region in Madrid in the near future, so perhaps it is not surprising that he is also looking at how best to connect the region to its global network. The new cable marks Google's first cable to Spain and its first private submarine route to the United Kingdom.
The cable will feature 16 pairs of fibers, which is a fairly standard number, but as the Google team points out, it will be the first to use a new switching architecture developed by the company in collaboration with SubCom. This new system is intended to provide greater reliability and allow the company to better move traffic in the event of outages.
Grace Hopper will be the fourth cable entirely owned by Google. In addition to these private cables, the company is also a member of numerous consortia that jointly manage cables around the world. In total, Google has now announced investments in 15 submarine cables, although it is also reportedly part of the next Blue-Raman cable that will pass between India and Italy via Israel. However, the company has yet to confirm its participation in this project.
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