RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Google has unveiled further details about the Curie submarine cable that connects the United States to Chile to provide services such as Gmail, YouTube, and Cloud in South America.
In addition, the company announced that it is preparing a new extension to Panama in order to improve its connectivity in Central America.
The Curie installation was completed by SubCom in April of this year. Since then, the required tests have been completed, but Google plans to integrate it into its infrastructure only in the second quarter of 2020, when it will begin transmitting data exclusively for the company’s services, including Gmail, Search, YouTube, and Google Cloud.
Measuring 10,500 kilometers, from coastal Valparaiso to Los Angeles, California, the Curie is the first submarine cable to connect to Chile in 19 years,. It has a bandwidth of 72 Tb/s (Terabytes/second), consisting of four pairs of 18 Tb/s fiber optics.
The Curie will have an extension to Balboa, Panama. The goal is to “increase connectivity and bandwidth for Central America,” according to Google. This cable will also be installed by SubCom, but no deadline has been announced for this to occur.
Google has three exclusive submarine cables
Google has two other unique submarine cables: the Dunant, which will connect the US and France by 2020; and the Equiano, to connect Portugal, Nigeria and South Africa by 2021.
The company says it can “add a level of security to what is available on the public Internet, and efficiently plan for the future capacity needs of our customers and users around the world”.
Subsea cables can carry data up to 8 times faster than satellites, so they are preferred by most companies. In fact, 99 percent of international telecommunications traffic is carried by submarine cables; this includes internet data, calls, and text messages.
This is why Google says that “cloud computing is not in the sky, it is in the ocean”.