Google to build new undersea cable linking US, UK and Spain

News Broadband Spain 28 JUL 2020
Google to build new undersea cable linking US, UK and Spain
Google has unveiled plans to build what will be its fourth wholly-owned cable and its second linking Europe and the US. The new Grace Hopper undersea cable between the US, UK and Spain – with landing points in New York, Bude and Bilbao – will be built by SubCom and is expected to be completed in 2022. It’s named after the computer science pioneer whose work was critical in the development of the COBOL programming language.

Grace Hopper will be equipped with 16 fibre pairs, a significant upgrade to the internet infrastructure connecting the US with Europe, and will be the first cable system to use a novel switching architecture developed in cooperation with SubCom that offers increased reliability and allows Google to better move traffic around outages. The company said it intends to deploy the technology in other systems in the future.

Google said Grace Hopper is its first investment in a private subsea cable route to the UK and its first-ever route to Spain. The Spanish landing point is designed to more tightly integrate the upcoming Google Cloud region in Madrid into the company’s global infrastructure, it added.

Google currently owns 3 other private subsea cables (Dunant between the US and France, Curie between the US and South America plus Equiano between Europe and Africa) and is a member of several global cable operating consortiums. 


 

Categories:

Fixed

Companies:

Google,  SubCom

Countries:

Spain,  United Kingdom,  United States

Tags:

Production planning & operations, Network equipment, Fibre, Internet Access, Wholesale, Enterprise

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