Google has announced a new submarine cable, Grace Hopper, which will run between the United States (Shirley), the United Kingdom (Bude), and Euskadi (Bilbao), and will provide greater support for the network that hosts the company's business and consumer products. company.

Grace Hopper joins Google's other private submarine cables (Curie, Dunant, and Equiano) to connect remote continents along the ocean floor. Private submarine cables allow you to effectively plan for the future capacity needs of customers and users around the world, as well as add a layer of security that goes beyond what is available on the public Internet network.

Once up and running, Grace Hopper will be one of the first new cables to connect the US and UK since 2003, increasing global capacity and powering Google services like Meet, Gmail, and Google Cloud. It also represents Google's first investment in a submarine cable route to the United Kingdom, and the first route to the Spanish state.

The landing in the Spanish state will more closely integrate the next Google Cloud region in Madrid into its infrastructure. The Grace Hopper cable will be equipped with 32 fibers, a significant upgrade to the Internet infrastructure that currently connects the United States and Europe. The contract to build the cable was signed a few months ago with Eatontown-based submarine cable provider SubCom, with the project expected to be completed in 2022.

Grace Hopper will feature the newest fiber optic switching, a technology that improves the reliability of global communications, allowing better movement of traffic in the event of outages. Engineers from Google and SubCom collaborated to incorporate this innovative architecture into the system. Grace Hopper is the world's first submarine cable to use this technology and they hope to implement this technology in other systems in the future. In 2017, Facebook and Microsoft united both sides of the Atlantic from Sopela.