| Grace Hopper | |
|---|---|
| Owners: | |
| Landing points | |
| Total length | 6,250 km + 6,300 km |
| Design capacity | 352 Tbit/s |
| Technology | Fibre Optic |
| Date of first use | September 27 2022 |
Grace Hopper is a private transatlantic communications cable that connects the United States of America (New York) with the UK (Bude) and Spain (Bilbao). It was announced by Google in 2020 and scheduled to go live in 2022. [1] The US to UK (Bude) leg went live on 27 September 2022. [2] [3]
In July 2020, Google announced that it would be investing in a new private subsea cable — Grace Hopper — its fourth private subsea cable after Curie (which was completed in 2019), [4] Dunant and Equiano. [5] The Grace Hopper cable, which links America with the UK and Spain was named after the American pioneering computer scientist Grace Brewster Murray Hopper, who was known for developing an early compiler that was important in the development of COBOL. Google said it was: "thrilled to honor Grace Hopper’s legacy of innovation by investing in the future of transatlantic communications with a state-of-the-art fiber optic cable". [6]
Google stated that the cable would provide better resilience for its network and marked its first investment in a private subsea cable route to the UK, and its first route to Spain. The cable, which went live in 2022, integrated the new Google Cloud region in Madrid more tightly into Google's global infrastructure. [7] Google's Jayne Stowell also has stated that another motivation for the investment is that many of the existing transatlantic cables are aging and need to be upgraded. “We need to be able to proactively manage the capacity availability, quality, latency, routing, technology and scalability of our network to provide constant, uninterruptible and high quality of network to Google services like Meet, Gmail and Google Cloud,” she said. [8] Telecoms industry analysts have said that the main purpose of Google's subsea cable investments in cables such as Grace Hopper are twofold: to support and control quality of service and to reduce costs. [9]
The Grace Hopper cable consists of 16 fiber pairs (32 fibers) of 22 Tbit/s each (352 Tbit/s total) and optical switching that increases its reliability and also enable Google to more easily move traffic around during outages. This technology was developed in co-operation with SubCom, formerly a TE Connectivity company, [10] who built the cable and which also worked with Google on the Dunant and Curie cables. [11]
The cable route comprises a 6,250 km stretch from New York to Widemouth Bay, Cornwall [12] and a 6,300 km route between New York and Bilbao. [13]
Owing to works managed by Telxius, [14] the cable landed in Sopelana (near Bilbao) on 10 September 2021. [15] It later landed near GCHQ Bude on 14 September 2021, with the location chosen as it was "an ideal, nicely protected beach and adjacent to a lot of the terrestrial infrastructure needed". [16]
A transatlantic telecommunications cable is a submarine communications cable connecting one side of the Atlantic Ocean to the other. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, each cable was a single wire. After mid-century, coaxial cable came into use, with amplifiers. Late in the 20th century, all cables installed used optical fiber as well as optical amplifiers, because distances range thousands of kilometers.
A submarine communications cable is a cable laid on the seabed between land-based stations to carry telecommunication signals across stretches of ocean and sea. The first submarine communications cables were laid beginning in the 1850s and carried telegraphy traffic, establishing the first instant telecommunications links between continents, such as the first transatlantic telegraph cable which became operational on 16 August 1858.
Global Cloud Xchange (GCX) is a company which provides network services for enterprises, new media providers and telecoms carriers. In September 2022, it was acquired by 3i Infrastructure for $512 million.
A cable landing point is the location where a submarine or other underwater cable makes landfall. The term is most often used for the landfall points of submarine telecommunications cables and submarine power cables. The landing will either be direct or via a branch from a main cable using a submarine branching unit. The branch can be several kilometres long.
Unity is a Trans-Pacific submarine communications cable between Japan and the United States that was completed in April 2010.
Equiano is a private transatlantic communications cable that connects western Europe (Portugal) with southern Africa. Branching points along the way connect to Togo, Nigeria, the island of St. Helena and Namibia.
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EllaLink is an optical submarine cable linking the European and South American continents with landing points in Sines in Portugal and Fortaleza in Brazil. It has currently the lowest latency on the market.
South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 5 is an optical fibre submarine communications cable system that carries telecommunications between Singapore and France.
West Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC) operates as a wholesaler, providing capacity to international telecoms, cloud operators, content providers and internet service providers within and out of Africa. WIOCC offers carriers connectivity to over 550 locations across 30 African countries – utilising more than 75,000 km (47,000 mi) of terrestrial fibre and 200,000 km (120,000 mi) of submarine fibre-optic cable. WIOCC's international network reach currently extends to 100 cities in 29 countries in Europe and more than 700 cities in 70 countries globally.
MAREA is a 6,605 km long transatlantic communications cable connecting the United States with Spain. Owned and funded by Microsoft and Meta Platforms, but constructed and operated by Telxius, a subsidiary of the Spanish telecom company Telefónica, it is the "highest-capacity submarine cable in the world" with a system design capacity of 200 terabits per second as of 2019.
NJFX, also known as New Jersey Fiber Exchange, is a Wall Township, NJ-based data center and subsea cable landing station operator. The company offers Tier 3 data center, meet-me room and colocation services, and a cable landing station on a 58 acre campus.
The Quantum Cable is a planned 7,700 km submarine communications cable system connecting Asia with Europe through the Mediterranean Sea. Quantum Cable will connect Cyprus to Italy, France and Bilbao, Spain. The Quantum Cable will be laid simultaneously with the 2,000 MW EuroAfrica Interconnector.
Hibernia Express is a submarine communications cable system which was privately owned by Hibernia Networks linking Canada, Ireland, and the UK. Hibernia Express is now owned by telecommunications provider GTT Communications, Inc. after their acquisition of Hibernia Networks. At 58.95ms of latency, the cable is currently the lowest latency fiber optic route between the NY4 data center in Secaucus, New Jersey and London.
Dunant is a private 250 Tbit/s 6,600 kilometre transatlantic communications cable that connects the United States with France (Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez). Named for Henry Dunant, it was announced by Google in 2018 and went live in 2020.
South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 6 is an in-progress optical fibre submarine communications cable system that would carry telecommunications between Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe. Construction began in early 2022. It is expected to be operational in the first quarter of 2025 The expected cable length is 19,200 km and it has a design capacity of 126 Tbit/s, using SDM technology.
Amitié is a private transatlantic communications cable that connects the United States (Lynn), with the UK (Bude) and France. It was announced in 2020 and went live in October 2023.
Curie is a private subsea communications cable owned by Google, connecting the United States to Chile and Panama. First commissioned in 2018 and completed in 2019, Curie is Google's third fully-owned subsea cable, and Chile's first subsea cable in nearly two decades.
Havfrue (Mermaid) is a submarine communications cable privately owned by Aqua Comms, Facebook, Google and Bulk Infrastructure, linking the United States, Ireland and Denmark.
