Dunant is one of Google’s recent private subsea cables.
Image: Getty Images/iStockphotoGoogle’s Transatlantic Dunant submarine cable system is ready for service, almost two-and-a-half years after announcing the project to bolster network capacity and resilience for Google Cloud customers.
The Dunant subsea cable connects Virginia Beach in the US with Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez on the French Atlantic coast, becoming Google’s 14th subsea cable. Dunant is one of Google’s recent private subsea cables, including: Curie, between Chile and Los Angeles; Equiano, between Portugal and South Africa; and Grace Hopper, a cable connecting New York to London, UK and Bilbao, Spain.
Dunant, says Google in a blogpost, “expands Google’s global network to add dedicated capacity, diversity, and resilience, while enabling interconnection to other network infrastructure in the region.”
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The cable has the capacity to deliver a massive 250 terabits per second across the Atlantic.
Google explains Dunant features a 12 fiber pair space-division multiplexing (SDM) design, a first of its kind. This design allows pump lasers and optical components to be shared among multiple fiber pairs and improves system availability.
The new capacity from Durant should help customers run apps better in the cloud and take advantage of the latest in machine learning in the cloud.
The next subsea cable to come online will be the Grace Hopper, scheduled to go live in 2022. It will give Google Cloud a massive global network of fiber optic links and subsea cables to support its 24 Google Cloud Platform regions, and over 100 Cloud CDN locations.
Google parent Alphabet yesterday reported that Google Cloud brought in revenue of $3.83 billion on losses of $1.24 billion for Q4 2020. The cloud business includes includes Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Google Workspace (formerly G Suite).
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This was the first earnings update Alphabet broke out Google Cloud earnings. Google Cloud’s full-year 2020 revenues were $13,059 billion, up 50% year-on-year, but it made a hefty loss of $5.61 billion.
Google is beefing up its Google Cloud business. Google Cloud was the largest component of new hires in Q4 of 4,149 people.
