UPDATED 12:00 EDT / JULY 17 2018

INFRA

Google has begun work on its first privately built trans-Atlantic subsea cable

Google LLC said today it’s beefing up its cloud infrastructure network with what it said will be the first private trans-Atlantic subsea cable built by a nontelecommunications company.

The Dunant Cable will span the Atlantic Ocean from Virginia Beach in the U.S. to the west coast of France by the time it’s completed by 2020, Google said.

The cable will add greater network capacity for Google across the Atlantic, which it describes as one of the “busiest routes” on the internet. The extra capacity is earmarked for the expected growth of Google’s Cloud Platform and services, and will deliver “high-bandwidth, low-latency, highly secure cloud connections between the U.S. and Europe,” the company said.

Google said it’s working with a company called TE SubCom to design, build and then lay the Dunant Cable across the Atlantic’s seabed.

Dunant is named after the French innovator Henri Dunant, who holds the distinction of being both the first Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of the Red Cross organization. The choice follows a trend Google set for the naming its subsea cables after historical innovators, which began with its first privately built subsea cable “Curie” that connects Los Angeles to Chile in South America.

Google only recently began building its own subsea cables. As Jayne Stowell, Google’s strategic negotiator of global infrastructure, wrote in a blog post, much of the company’s older infrastructure is made up of capacity it purchased from existing cables and cables built through a consortium of partners.

In recent times, however, Google has decided that these existing connections are not enough to meet its growing demands for performance, latency and capacity. The company also wanted to ensure it had guaranteed bandwidth for the lifetime of the cables it uses, hence the decision to build its own.

pasted-image-0

Google’s Dunant Cable

“Cables are often built to serve a very specific route,” Stowell wrote. “When we build privately, we can choose this route based on what will provide the lowest latency for the largest segment of customers. In this case, we wanted connectivity across the Atlantic that was close to certain data centers.”

Image: Kantasimo/Pixabay

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU