Google's Dunant subsea cable is operational now

As well as the 250Tbps Dunant cable, work is ongoing on the Equiano and Grace Hopper cables, connecting New York and South Africa to Europe

Google's Dunant subsea cable system, which can deliver data at a speed of 250 terabits per second (Tbps), is ready for service.

Google ' s privately owned subsea cable connects Virginia Beach in the US with Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez on the French Atlantic coast. The company built the cable in partnership with telecoms equipment firm SubCom.

"We ' re thrilled to say bonjour to the Dunant submarine cable system, which has been deployed and tested and is now ready for service," Chris Ciauri, President, EMEA, Google Cloud, said in a blog post.

"The historic landing was made possible in partnership with SubCom, a global partner for undersea data transport, which engineered, manufactured and installed the Dunant system on schedule despite the ongoing global pandemic."

The Dunant cable is named after Swiss social activist Henry Dunant, the first recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and founder of the Red Cross. Google announced the project in 2018, saying at the time that it expected the new system to be operational in 2020. It extended the deadline in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, and due to the complications of laying a 4,000-mile subsea cable between continents.

Dunant features a space-division multiplexing design using 12 fibre pairs - an upgrade from earlier subsea cables, which featured six or eight pairs.

Google expects the new system to add dedicated capacity, resilience and diversity to its global network, while also enabling it to connect to other network infrastructure in Europe.

The US tech giant is also building the Equiano cable from South Africa to Portugal, which it expects to become operational later this year.

Google describes the Equiano cable as 'the first subsea cable to incorporate optical switching at the fibre-pair level, rather than the traditional approach of wavelength-level switching.'

'This greatly simplifies the allocation of cable capacity, giving us the flexibility to add and reallocate it in different locations as needed.'

Last July, Google said that it will build a Grace Hopper cable in partnership with SubCom, which will feature 16 fibre pairs and connect New York and Europe.

'Grace Hopper will incorporate novel optical fibre switching that allows for increased reliability in global communications, enabling us to better move traffic around outages,' Google said.

The project is expected to complete in 2022.

Google and a consortium of technology companies finished the laying of the 60 Tbps fibre internet cable between the US and Japan in 2016. This project was announced in August 2014 and took just under two years to complete.