Google unveiled plans for a new subsea cable — Grace Hopper — which will run between the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain. The cable is named for computer science pioneer Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (1906–1992), an admiral in the U.S. Navy best known for her work in developing the COBOL programming language.
The Grace Hopper cable will be equipped with 16 fiber pairs (32 fibers). Subcom has been selected as the lead contractor. The project is expected to be completed in 2022.
Google said the Grace Hopper cable system will be the first to use a novel optical fiber switching that allows for increased reliability by moving traffic around outages.
Grace Hopper joins Google’s other private subsea cables, Curie, Dunant and Equiano.
Google completes Curie – California-to-Chile subsea cable
Google’s 10,500-km “Curie” subsea cable stretching from California to Chile is now ready for service. The new cable is equipped four 18 Tbps fiber optic pairs, a design capacity of 72 Tbps.
Google also announced the first Curie branch into Panama. Subcom has been selected for the project.
Curie represents Google’s third wholly-owned subsea cable. The other projects are Dunant, which crosses the Atlantic from Virginia to France, and Equiano, which will link Portugal to South Africa.
Google announces Equiano cable from Portugal to South Africa
The Equiano subsea cable, which is named for Olaudah Equiano, a Nigerian-born writer and abolitionist who was enslaved as a boy, will include a branching unit to Nigeria.
Google plans to use state-of-the-art space-division multiplexing (SDM) technology to achieve approximately 20 times more network capacity than the last cable built to serve this region.
The cable will be the first to incorporate optical switching at the fiber-pair level, rather than the traditional approach of wavelength-level switching. Google says this design will greatly simplify the allocation of cable capacity.
Equiano is fully funded by Google. Alcatel Submarine Networks was awarded a contract in Q4 2018. The first phase of the project, connecting South Africa with Portugal, is expected to be completed in 2021.
