Today, 98% of international Internet traffic is sent around the world using submarine cables. An extensive underwater network of cables traversing the ocean allows information to be sent, searched for, sent and received around the world at the speed of light.
Today, 98% of international Internet traffic is sent around the world using submarine cables. An extensive underwater network of cables traversing the ocean allows information to be sent, searched for, sent and received around the world at the speed of light.
In today’s increasingly digitalized way of working, playing and communicating, reliable connectivity is more important than ever. That’s why Google announced a new submarine cable, the Grace Hopper, that will run between the United States, the UK and Spain, providing better resilience to the network that underpins Google’s consumer and enterprise products.
Once operational, the Grace Hopper Cable will be one of the first new cables to connect the US and UK since 2003, increasing capacity at this busy global intersection and powering Google services such as Meet, Gmail and Google Cloud.
According to the project, the length of the new Google submarine cable to the UK will be 6.25 thousand km, to Spain – 6.3 thousand km. The cable will be laid along the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The Grace Hopper cable will be equipped with 16 fiber pairs (32 fibers), greatly improving the Internet infrastructure connecting the US to Europe. The contract to build the cable was signed earlier this year with New Jersey-based Eatontown SubCom and the project is expected to be completed in 2022.
Grace Hopper will introduce new fiber switching to improve the reliability of global communications, allowing Google to better move traffic during outages. Google and SubCom engineers have jointly implemented this innovative switching architecture into the system. Grace Hopper is the world’s first submarine cable to use this technology.
This cable is named after computer science pioneer Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (1906–1992), best known for his work on one of the first linkers (compilers) that was critical to the development of the COBOL programming language. She is also credited for finding the real "bug" in the program; her team tracked down the source of the short on an early Harvard Mark II computer and found a trap on the panel. We are thrilled to honor Grace Hopper’s legacy of innovation by investing in the future of transatlantic communications with state-of-the-art fiber optic cable.