In July 2018, Google announced the laying of the Dunant submarine cable, which is named after Henri Dunant, the initiator of the creation of the international humanitarian organization Red Cross, the first-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
The cable is supposed to connect the cluster in Northern Virginia, where the corporation has built two large data centers, with Europe. According to the plan, the traffic was supposed to go through the highway last year, but the pandemic ruined everything. But now everything is ready - the cable, the corresponding infrastructure are ready to go.
By the way, this cable became the first private trunk, which was not laid by a telecommunications company. “Dunant will be the first private transatlantic cable to be installed by a non-telecom company,” said Jayne Stowell, strategic negotiator for Google's Global Infrastructure , in 2018. "It increases network capacity across the Atlantic Ocean, expanding one of the busiest routes on the Internet and supporting the growth of Google Cloud."
The project was implemented together with SubCom - it designed, manufactured and laid the entire system almost without problems (it was already said above that the main stage of the project coincided with the onset of a pandemic). Telxius completed its part of the work on the US coast.
The backbone is notable for being the first high-haul submarine cable with 12-pair space division multiplexing optical fiber. The increased bandwidth of the cable is provided just by the additional pairs of fibers, plus the addition of repeaters with power optimization.
Google Cloud currently includes fiber optic lines and submarine backbones between 100 points of presence. The system also includes thousands of nodes, over 100 Cloud CDN locations, 91 interconnect points and 24 GCP regions. Another transatlantic cable Grace Hopper will soon be added to the general infrastructure of the company.
The company announced its laying in the middle of last year. It will unite three countries at once - the USA, Great Britain and Spain. Here, too, it is not without the help of SubCom - this American company will carry out all the necessary work at sea, including the laying between New York, Buda (UK) and Bilbao (Spain). The project should be completed by 2022.
Its goal, like the overall goal of expanding infrastructure, is to increase the bandwidth and speed of all Google services - Meet, Gmail and Google Cloud.
The length of the highway from Google to the UK will be 6.25 thousand km, and to Spain - 6.3 thousand km. 32 optical fibers will be placed inside the shell, these are 16 fiber-optic pairs.
The corporation already operates three submarine lines:
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