Google's submarine cable splurge seems to gain momentum every year, and as time goes on they are steadily taking a more direct hand. Today they unveiled their latest project, the Dunant transatlantic cable system, named after the Swiss Nobel Laureate and founder of the Red Cross, Henry Dunant.
Dunant will span some 6,400km with four fiber pairs. It will hook up the hot new landing spot down in Virginia Beach with the Atlantic coast of France, thus providing yet another diverse route between the US and Europe that bypasses the UK entirely.
Google is building this one privately, without building a consortium or serving as anchor customer for a different cable operator. This lets them control things like performance, latency, capacity, and lifespan of an asset that has become central to the company's future.
Well, that and the fact that they don't have to waste time convincing other rooms full of people to do what they already know they're going to do.
TE Subcom will be doing the heavy lifting of actually building the cable, supplying the necessary gear from its A1 product line. The cable is expected to go live in late 2020, so there's time yet for it to evolve further.
