Google to lay out a fourth undersea cable, connecting the US to UK and Spain

Google has announced that they will be laying a fourth sub-sea cable through the Atlantic Ocean, connecting the United States to the United Kingdom and Spain. The cable is named Grace Hopper, after the famous Computer Scientist.

The Vice President of Google Global Network, Bikash Koley, announced these plans in a blog post on the 28th of July. The blog post informed its readers that, “98% of international internet traffic is ferried around the world by sub-sea cables.”

The three previous undersea cables laid out by Google are Curie, that connects the US to South America, Dunant, connecting the US to France, and Equiano, connecting Europe to Africa. Google also operates many other underwater cables including the Pacific Light Cables Network, which they operates alongside Facebook.

The new cable is expected to be the first to incorporate new optical fibre switching for increased reliability and faster transfer of data and information. These optical fibres will be included in the undersea cable system in the form of 16 fibre pairs: 32 fibres in total.

The Grace Hopper cable is scheduled to be functional sometime in the year 2022. The cable will be built by SubCom, the company which previously built the Curie and the Dunant cables. The Grace Hopper is expected be the first direct subsea cable to Spain. It will be supporting Google’s new Cloud region in Madrid.

The Grace Hopper is expected to be, “providing better resilience for the network that underpins Google’s consumer and enterprise products.”