Google Announces New Subsea Cable Connecting U.S., U.K. and Spain

Google has announced a new subsea cable linking the United States, United Kingdom and Spain. The cable is named “Grace Hopper” after an American computer scientist Grace Brewster Murray Hopper will join Google’s subsea cables, Curie, Dunant and Equiano. The cable uses 16 fiber pairs and incorporates novel optical fiber switching that Google expects to enhance global communications’ reliability and facilitate better allocation of traffic through navigation of outages. According to Google, “Grace Hopper cable will be one of the first new cables to connect the U.S. and U.K. since 2003, increasing capacity on this busy global crossroads and powering Google services like Meet, Gmail and Google Cloud. It also marks our first investment in a private subsea cable route to the U.K., and our first-ever route to Spain.”