Google has announced it is installing a new undersea cable that will link the US, UK and Spain.
The vast majority of international internet traffic, as much as 98%, is carried via undersea cables. Google already has three other private undersea cables, connecting the US to Chile, the US to France and Portugal to South Africa.
The latest cable, the Grace Hopper, will connect the UK and Spain with the US. According to Google, this is one of the first private cables connecting the UK and US since 2003. The cable while help increase bandwidth to power Google’s cloud services.
“Grace Hopper will incorporate novel optical fiber switching that allows for increased reliability in global communications, enabling us to better move traffic around outages,” said Bikash Koley, VP, Google Global Network. “Google and SubCom engineers collaborated on incorporating this innovative switching architecture into the system. Grace Hopper is the world’s first submarine cable to use this technology, and we look forward to deploying the technology on other systems in the future.”
Once completed, the cable should help Google keep up with the increased demand of companies switching to the cloud in record numbers.
