Google's New Submarine Web Cable Will Carry Millions of 4K Videos Simultaneously

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• Google's New Submarine Web Cable Will Carry Millions of 4K Videos Simultaneously

Google has revealed that its latest undersea web cable is going to be operational soon, after being successfully docked in the UK. Announced in July XNUMX, the Grace Hopper Cable (named after the COBOL author) connects the UK, US and Spain and will provide additional capacity and resilience through these communication corridors. According to a Google weblog post, the cable will be the first to connect the UK and the US since XNUMX, and will play an essential role in supporting business-to-business cooperation across the Atlantic. "Lots of people around the world use Google products on a daily basis to keep in touch with friends and family, travel from point A to point B, find new customers for the service or export products to new markets," Google said. "As the first Google-funded cable to the UK, Grace Bopper is a part of our continued investment in the country, supporting users who trust our products and service customers who use our tools to grow their business." . The project also marks Google's first investment in a submarine cable mooring in Spain and will serve to connect the Google Cloud area in the Spanish capital to the company's broader global infrastructure.

Record capacity

Thanks to a whopping 4 pairs of fibers, the Grace Hopper cable will boast a record capacity of XNUMX Tbps, which according to Google is equivalent to about XNUMX million people streaming XNUMXK video at the same time. The current record is held by Google's Dunant cable, which delivers XNUMX Tbps. The new cable also benefits from a new "fiber switching" technique that is supposed to minimize the risk of faults. “Grace Hopper will use this new switching architecture to provide the perfect levels of network flexibility and resiliency to accommodate unpredictable outages or traffic patterns. This multi-directional switching architecture is a significant advance in uncertain times,” said Jayne Stowell, who works on the project at Google Cloud. According to Stowell, the new cable will carry traffic "fast and secure" across the Atlantic Ocean, supporting popular Google services like Gmail and Meet. Over the past year, Google has announced a number of new undersea web cables to meet global demand, including Firmina, Dunant, Apricot, Blue, and Raman. Collectively, the company now has at least a stake in nineteen different cable networks.