Today, in partnership with SubCom, Google announced that its privately owned Dunant subsea cable between Virginia Beach, Virginia and Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez on the French Atlantic Coast is now operational.
The project was first announced in the middle of 2018 and was named after the first Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of the Red Cross, Henry Dunant.
At the time, the expectation was that the project would go live in 2020. However, laying cable between continents is difficult, without considering that there were probably no pre-planned budget for the pandemic.
Insane transmission speeds
The cable is almost 4000 miles long and can transmit 250 terabits per second. It is enough to transfer the entire digitized Library of Congress three times every second. In contrast with older cables, Dunant has 12-fibre pairs, combined with several technical innovations that maximize bandwidth.
Mark Sokol, the senior director of infrastructure at Google Cloud, said that Google is dedicated to meeting the growing demand for cloud services and other online content. He added that with record-breaking capacity and transmission speed, Dunant would make content access easier.
What next?
According to Sokol, Google Cloud will benefit from Dunant, and it would not have been possible to complete without the dedication of both SubCom and Google, partners, suppliers, and other people who had to go through several challenges to complete the project.
With Dunant operational, the next Google cable to go live will be the Grace Hopper cable between New York and Europe, landing at Bude, UK and Bilbao, Spain.
The Grace Hopper cable was first announced in July 2020 and will be built in partnership with SubCom.