Google subsea cable set to deliver 250TB data per second

Crossing the Atlantic Ocean between Virginia Beach in the US and Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez on the French Atlantic coast, the system expands Google's global network to add dedicated capacity, diversity, and resilience

San Francisco: The new subsea cable between the US and mainland Europe, named after Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of the Red Cross, Henry Dunant, is now ready for service and can transmit the entire digitised Library of Congress three times every second, Google has announced.

Crossing the Atlantic Ocean between Virginia Beach in the US and Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez on the French Atlantic coast, the system expands Google’s global network to add dedicated capacity, diversity, and resilience, while enabling interconnection to other network infrastructure in the region.

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“We originally announced the Dunant cable is the first long-haul subsea cable to feature a 12 fibre pair space-division multiplexing (SDM) design, and will deliver record-breaking capacity of 250 terabits per second (Tbps) across the ocean,” Chris Ciauri, President, EMEA, Google Cloud said late on Wednesday.

The historic landing was made possible in partnership with SubCom, a global partner for undersea data transport, which engineered, manufactured and installed the Dunant system on schedule despite the ongoing global pandemic.

Google first announced this project back in the middle of 2018 and it was expected to go live in 2020, but the pandemic struck.

While previous subsea cable technologies relied on a dedicated set of pump lasers to amplify each fibre pair, the SDM technology used in Dunant allows pump lasers and associated optical components to be shared among multiple fibre pairs.

This ‘pump sharing’ technology enables more fibres within the cable while also providing higher system availability.

The Google Cloud network consists of fiber optic links and subsea cables — which will soon include the Grace Hopper subsea cable —between more that 100 points of presence, thousands of edge node locations, 91 dedicated interconnect locations and 24 Google Cloud Platform (GCP) regions, with additional regions announced in places like Chile, Spain, Italy, France and Poland.