Google to lay private cable across the Atlantic

Google has announced a draft of the new Dunant submarine cable, named after Henri Dunant, the initiator of the creation of the international humanitarian organization Red Cross, the first ever Nobel Peace Prize winner.

As the Red Cross doctors help the wounded on the battlefield, so the Dunant cable in some way is designed to help the cluster in the Northern Virginia (Northern Virginia Cloud Region), where Google is now building two large data centers. These data centers will be a key element of the Google Cloud infrastructure in the US East Coast. In turn, Dunant will link this cluster with Europe. The first traffic will go on cable in 2020.

“Dunant will be the first privately-owned transatlantic cable laid by a non-telecommunications company,” said Jayne Stowell, a strategic negotiator in Google’s Global Infrastructure division. “It increases network capacity across the Atlantic Ocean, expanding one of the busiest routes on the Internet, and supporting the growth of Google Cloud.”

As can be seen in the diagram, the cable is partially laid underground. This applies to both the land and oceanic part of the route. Only in the deepest part does it reach the surface and is laid directly along the bottom. The landing point in the European part is on the territory of France, from there the cable goes further to Belgium.



The contractor for this project in terms of design, production and cable laying is the American company TE SubCom, which specializes in the manufacture and laying of submarine cables.

Google is actively investing in the international fiber optic infrastructure. In January of this year, the company announced the laying of three new cables :

• Curie, linking Los Angeles and Chile;
• Havfrue, connecting the US with Denmark and Ireland (shared with Facebook, Aqua Comms and Bulk Infrastructure);
• Hong-Kong-Guam cable system (HK-G), which will unite “the largest nodes of underwater communications in Asia” (together with RTI-C and NEC).

All of these projects will further expand Google’s global communications infrastructure. She really needs expansion. According to some estimates, Google generates 25% of the global Internet traffic (mainly due to YouTube, but also due to cloud infrastructure).


Three new cables are planned to be commissioned in 2019.

Along with the laying of new channels, Google is expanding its ground-based cloud infrastructure. This year we plan to open new Cloud Platform regions in the Netherlands, Montreal, Los Angeles, Finland and Hong Kong. Now Google Cloud infrastructure covers 16 regions, 49 zones and more than 100 points of presence. Recent purchases of data centers in Northern Virginia will dramatically improve the infrastructure of the Northern Virginia Cloud Region.

“Owning your own cabling has some distinct advantages,” wrote Treynor Sloss, vice president of Google’s 24/7 Operations division. “Since we control the design and construction process, we can completely determine the technical characteristics of the cable, optimize the deployment and provide services to users and customers faster. In addition, as soon as the cable began to work, we can make routing decisions with optimal latency and availability. ”

In the future, Google plans to continue laying its own cables and participating in such joint projects. But the sole installation is still preferable: “Cables are often laid to service a very specific route,” explains Stowell. - When we do it privately, we can choose this route based on the least delay for the largest customer segment. In this case [talk about Dunant cable - approx. Ed.] we wanted to establish a channel across the Atlantic, close to certain data centers. ” Data centers in Northern Virginia are approximately 350 km from the landing point of the Dunant cable.

Continuing the traditions of Curie and Dunant, the future Google Cables will be named alphabetically after the names of influential innovators of the past.