Underlining its growing strength in diverse areas of telecommunications and IT, search engine giant Google has announced that Curie, a 10,500-kilometer-long undersea cable, now connects Google data centres in the US and Chile.
Google announced not only that the fibre optic cable has been successfully installed and tested but that it is expected to begin transmitting data in the second quarter of 2020. Google says it is already working on a branch into Panama, the first Curie branch into that country.
Equipped with four 18 Tbps fibre-optic pairs and running from the US to Chile, Curie (named after scientist Marie Curie) delivers 72 Tbps of bandwidth to South America. Curie landed in Valparaiso last April, and was the first subsea cable to connect to Chile in 19 years.
SubCom, a global partner for undersea data transport, engineered, manufactured and installed the Curie system ahead of schedule, says Google. SubCom has also been selected to supply the Curie branch to Panama.
Once operational, this branch will enhance connectivity and bandwidth to Central America, and increase Google’s ability to connect to other networks in the region, providing resiliency to its global cloud infrastructure.
Google says that by owning and operating its own subsea cables its can add a layer of security beyond what is available over the public internet, and can plan effectively for the future capacity needs of its customers and users around the world.
Curie is Google’s third wholly owned subsea cable. There are also Dunant, which crosses the Atlantic from the Virginia coast in the US to the French coast, and Equiano, which will route from Portugal to South Africa.
