Google's Grace Hopper undersea cable has landed in the UK. Acting as a new link between the US, UK, and Spain, the internet cable stretches 3,900 miles from New York to Cornwall and Bilbao.
Grace Hopper, one of the first new cables to bridge the US and UK since 2003, joins Google's quartet of private networks—Curie, Dunant, Equiano, and Firmina—in tethering distant continents along the ocean floor.
"With the ongoing pandemic fostering a new digital normal, Google-funded subsea cables allow us to plan and prepare for the future capacity needs of our customers, no matter where they are in the world," according to Jayne Stowell, strategic negotiator of global infrastructure for Google Cloud. "Grace Hopper will connect the UK to help meet the rapidly growing demand for high-bandwidth connectivity and services," she wrote in a blog announcement.
Following a successful landing in Bilbao earlier this month (marking Google's first funded route to Spain), the cable is on schedule to be fully functional in 2022, a Google spokesperson told CNET. The company did not immediately respond to PCMag's request for comment.
Similar to open subsea cable Firmina—set to run from the US east coast to Las Toninas, Argentina, and become one of the longest cables in the world—Grace Hopper is capable of operating entirely from a single power source at one end (known as "fibre switching") if, for some reason, its other sources are temporarily unavailable.
The cable is named after computer science pioneer Grace Brewster Murray Hopper, US Navy rear admiral and inventor of one of the first linkers—critical in the development of the high-level COBOL programming language. She is also credited as an early programmer of the Harvard Mark 1 computer and was awarded 40 honorary degrees from universities across the world. Hopper died at the age of 85 on Jan. 1, 1992.