Deep-sea Google search
Giant’s fibre-optic cable from Cornwall to the US
GOOGLE has revealed plans for a new transatlantic internet cable that will connect the UK and Spain with the United States.
The ‘Grace Hopper’ fibreoptic link will begin in New York and stretch nearly 4,000 miles to Bude, Cornwall, with a fork splitting off to Bilbao, in the Bay of Biscay.
It has been named after Grace Hopper, an American navy rear admiral and computer science pioneer at Harvard University. Google said the link will boost the amount of data it can send between North America
and Europe and includes cutting-edge technology to reduce the chance of outages.
Undersea cables are still used to carry 98 per cent of internet traffic around the world, with the route between America and the UK among the busiest thoroughfares. The Grace Hopper cable is expected to be finished by 2022.
The link will provide capacity of up to 350 terabytes per second – enough for 17.5million people to stream 4K high-definition video at the same time.
Its route has an average depth of nearly 11,000ft but plunges as low as 27,500ft. Google did not say how much the project will cost but a similar link laid between Japan and the US by the company and one of its partners previously set them back a reported £230million.
It is the latest private link built by Google, which wholly owns three more and has involvement with several others through global business groups. Internet cables are usually built by specialist communications firms, which then charge other businesses to use them.
But Google has increasingly built its own dedicated infrastructure as it becomes more involved in providing cloud computing services. The first transatlantic cable was laid in 1858, stretching from Ireland to North America, enabling Queen Victoria to exchange messages in minutes that would until then have taken weeks by ship.
Yesterday Bikash Koley, Google’s vice-president for global networks, said: ‘As the ways we work, play and connect are becoming increasingly digital, reliable connectivity is more important than ever before.
‘Private subsea cables allow us to plan effectively for the future capacity needs of our customers and users around the world and add a layer of security beyond what’s available over the public internet.’