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 it is the first submarine cable with a space-division multiplexing design with twelve fiber pairs. That should lead to a record-breaking capacity of 250 Tbit/s, according to the company. Previous submarine cables would have used up to eight or six fiber pairs.
In addition, SubCom says that 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 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 address “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 on this.
Dunant was announced in 2018 and is not the first cable that Google has built. For example, in April 2019 Curie, a submarine cable between the US and Chile, was completed. Google is also planning another cable together with SubCom, which will run from New York to both Bilbao in Spain and Bude in the United Kingdom. It should be operational in 2022. In addition, Google is working on a submarine cable between South Africa and Portugal.