Google is building a new undersea cable to carry megabits between the eastern United States, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. The fiber optic line, called Firmina, is set to begin operating in 2023.
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“The infrastructure of the internet is not in the cloud, it’s in the ocean,” said Bikash Koley, vice president of global networking at Google. Firmina is the 16th undersea cable that Google has invested in or built. “The internet is growing at a steady pace every year. We expect that growth to continue,” he said.
The added capacity is important for serving consumer services like search, Gmail and YouTube, as well as enterprise infrastructure like Google Cloud. About 98% of international data travels on submarine cables that lie on the bottom of oceans and seas, Google said.
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As with Google Doodles, Google pays tribute to notable figures with undersea cables. This cable is named after Maria Firmina dos Reis, a writer who wrote about the lives of Afro-Brazilian slaves in her novel Úrsula (1859).
Google names its own undersea cables alphabetically. The most recently announced undersea cable is named after Grace Hopper — a female scientist who discovered a real bug in an early computer. Previously, Google cables were named Curie, Dunant, and Equiano.
Google didn't share the cable's expected data capacity, but it will carry data over 12 pairs of fiber optic lines across thousands of miles. By comparison, the 16-pair Grace Hopper cable has a capacity of 250 terabits per second over 16 pairs of fiber that connects the U.S. to the U.K. and Spain.
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Google has hired SubCom to design and install the undersea cable. It will build the undersea cable this year at its facility in Newington, New Hampshire, and install the cable in the summer of 2022, SubCom said.
Information source: cnet.com
