New Google undersea cable ‘Grace Hopper’ to connect US and Europe

• Google announced a new undersea cable project on Tuesday.
• Named after American computer scientist Grace Hopper, the new cable will connect the US with the UK and Spain.
• Google says it expects the cable to be finished by 2022.
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Google is planning to lay more than 3,000 miles of transatlantic undersea cable by 2022.

The tech giant announced its new Grace Hopper undersea cable project on Tuesday.

The Grace Hopper cable, named after the famous US computer scientist, will connect New York to Bude in the UK and Bilbao, Spain. The distance from New York to Bude in Cornwall, England is roughly 3,290 miles.

In a statement Google said Grace Hopper marks its first private investment in a private subsea cable route to the UK, and its first ever cable route to Spain.

Google says the Grace Hopper cable is expected to be completed by 2022, and the company will use a new technique to make it more reliable than existing fibre-optic cables.

“Grace Hopper will incorporate novel optical fiber switching that allows for increased reliability in global communications, enabling us to better move traffic around outages,” Google said.

The cable is set to funnel 340-350 terabytes of data per second, which according to Google equates to 17.5 million people streaming 4K videos simultaneously.

Google already has three privately-owned undersea cables: Curie, Dunant and Equiano.

Curie runs down the West coast of the US from Los Angeles all the way down to Valparaiso in Chile, stopping off in Panama, and is already online. Dunant stretches from Virginia Beach in the US to France, and is expected to become accessible later this year. Equiano runs from Portugal all the way down the West coast of Africa to Cape Town, South Africa, and is expected to be completed next year.