The submarine cable between the United States and Europe, laid by Google and contractor SubCom, is ready for use. The cable runs between Virginia Beach and the French coast and has a capacity of 250Tbit / s.
The cable is called Dunant and, according to SubCom, is the first submarine cable with a space-division multiplexing design with twelve fiber pairs . That should lead to “record-breaking capacity of 250 Tbit / s,” the company said. Previous submarine cables would have used up to eight or six fiber pairs.
In addition, SubCom says previous cables required a number of pump lasers to amplify each fiber pair, but the space-division multiplexing design would result in the pump lasers and optical components being shared between different fiber pairs. This allows more fiber pairs to be served, which would lead to a higher system availability.
The cable runs from Virginia Beach to Saint-Hilaire-deRiez in France and has a length of approximately 6400km. Google says the cable is needed to respond to the “ exploding demand for cloud services and online content, ” specifically citing support for Google Cloud. Dunant is said to have a low latency, although the companies do not provide specific data about this.
Dunant was announced in 2018 and is not the first cable that Google has laid out. For example, Curie, a submarine cable between the US and Chile, was completed in April 2019.
Google is once again planning another cable with SubCom , which will run from New York to both Bilbao in Spain and Bude in the United Kingdom. This should be operational in 2022. In addition, Google is working on a submarine cable between South Africa and Portugal.
