Google has announced a new subsea cable – Grace Hopper – running between the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain.
Grace Hopper joins Google’s other private subsea cables, Curie , Dunant and Equiano to connect far-flung continents along the ocean floor.
The Grace Hopper cable will also be one of the first cables to connect the US and UK since 2003.
It also marks Google’s first investment in a private subsea cable route to UK and its first-ever route to Spain.
The cable will have 16 fiber pairs (32 fibers), a further upgrade to the internet infrastructure connecting the US with Europe.
Subsea cable provider SubCom has secured the contract to build the cable, earlier this year.
According to Google, the project should wrap up in 2022.
The system will incorporate novel optical fiber switching that allows for increased reliability in global communications.
Google and SubCom engineers collaborated on incorporating this innovative switching architecture into the system.
According to Google it is the world’s first submarine cable to use this technology, and the company said it will deploy this technology on other systems in the future.
Specifically, this cable honours the computer science pioneer Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (1906–1992).
She is best known for her work on one of the first linkers (compilers), which was critical in the development of the COBOL programming language.