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Google subsea cable from Europe to Cape Town

Google recently announced the rollout of a new subseacable that will start in Western Europe and run along the Coast of Africa between Portugal and South Africa, according to their blog.

What is a “subsea cable”?  A subsea cable, also known as submarine communications cable is a cable laid on the sea bed between two stretches of land. It was first used from the 1850s to carry telegraphy traffic and is today used to send digital data across oceans from one continent to another.

Image courtesy of Google (www.google.com)

The cable will be capable of carrying 20 times the capacity of the last cable that connected these two regions. It will be the first subsea fibre optic cable that uses optical switching at the fibre-pair level, where other cables make use of the traditional wavelength-level-switching approach.

This new method makes it much easier for Google to allocate cable capacity improving their flexibility to add or move capacity to different regions as necessary.

The cable is expected to be complete in 2021.