Google finishes laying a giant undersea internet cable stretching 3,900 miles from New York to the UK and Spain
- Google finished laying its Grace Hopper subsea internet cable in the UK on Tuesday.
- The 3,900-mile Grace Hopper cable starts in New York and has landing points in the UK and Spain.
- The cable is due to ferry up to 350 terabytes of data per second when it comes online, Google said.
Google has finished laying its giant Grace Hopper subsea internet cable, which stretches from New York to the UK and Spain.
The Grace Hopper cable was landed in Bude, Cornwall, on the UK's western coast on Tuesday. A Google spokesperson told Insider that the landing was originally scheduled for July. Another end of the cable landed in Bilbao, Spain, earlier in September.
Google first announced its Grace Hopper cable project, which now spans more than 3,900 miles across the Atlantic, in July 2020.
Google said at that time that the cable was set to transport between 340 and 350 terabytes of data per second, or roughly equivalent to 17.5 million people simultaneously streaming 4K video.
The company also said the cable would use a new technique called "fibre switching," which should make web traffic more reliable even with outages.
A Google spokesperson said the cable is due to come online in 2022.
Grace Hopper isn't the only Google cable linking the US with Europe. In February, the company announced that its "Dunant" cable connecting the US with France was ready for service.
Google is invested in undersea cable projects around the world. The company said in August it had partnered with Facebook to build a new cable called "Apricot," which is planned to link six countries in Asia using 7,456 miles of cable.
Apricot is due to come online in 2024.
In June, Google announced plans to lay a new cable called "Firmina" running from the US West Coast down to Argentina. The company already has a cable called "Curie," which connects the US West Coast with Panama and Chile. Curie came online in 2019.