Google’s Grace Hopper Subsea Fibre to Link UK, USA and Spain

Internet technology giant Google has announced plans to construct a new private subsea fibre optic cable – called ‘Grace Hopper‘ – between the USA (New York), United Kingdom (Bude in Cornwall) and Spain (Bilbao), which could improve the performance of their online services and ensure plenty of data capacity for the future.

The cable itself will be equipped with 16 fibre pairs (32 fibres) and incorporate novel optical fibre switching technology (the world’s first submarine cable to use it), which Google says will allow for increased reliability in global communications, “enabling us to better move traffic around outages.”

A contract to build the cable itself was signed earlier this year with Eatontown, N.J.-based subsea cable provider, SubCom, and the entire project is expected to be completed in 2022. Sadly, the official announcement doesn’t say much more than that, although we do get a brief video (see below).

The news follows only a couple of months after a Facebook linked consortium announced plans to build a major 37,000km long subsea (submarine) fibre optic cable of its own called 2Africa (here), which will run between the UK and most of coastal Africa by around the end of 2023.

This cable is named for computer science pioneer Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (1906–1992), best known for her work on one of the first linkers (compilers), which was critical in the development of the COBOL programming language. She’s also credited with famously finding an actual “bug” in a program; her team tracked down the source of a short circuit on the early Harvard Mark II computer to a moth trapped in a panel.