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Google has announced plans to roll out its sixth private undersea cable to connect the United States to various points in South America, a move designed to strengthen low-latency access to its products and services, including Google Cloud.
Named Firmina in honor of Brazilian abolitionist Maria Firmina dos Reis, the cable will be constructed with 12 pairs of fibers and will feature an integrated key resilience function. In a blog, Bikash Koley, VP of Global Networking at Google Cloud, explained that it will be the longest cable in the world capable of supporting operations with a single-ended power source in the event that one or more of its other power sources go offline.
While shorter cable systems may enjoy the greater availability of power from a single end, longer cables with a high number of fiber pairs make it more difficult to make, he wrote. Achieving this record-breaking, high-resilience design is achieved by providing the cable 20% more tension than previous systems.
He added that the cable will help provide users with fast, low-latency access to Google products such as Search, Gmail, and YouTube, as well as Google Cloud services.
The Firminas route will run from the Mid-Atlantic United States to Las Toninas, Argentina, with branches extending to Praia Grande, Brazil, and Punta del Este, Uruguay. Two of the cable landing points appear to correspond to existing Google Cloud regions located in Northern Virginia in the United States and Sao Paulo, Brazil.
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Koley said Firmina brings Google’s total tally of submarine cable investments to 16. These include its six private cables including Junior, Curie, Dunant, Equiano, and Grace Hopper, as well as jointly funded cables, such as the Echo cable announced by Facebook in March. According to a listing from research firm TeleGeography, Google is a leader in investing in submarine cables, with Facebook in second place and the like as Amazon and Microsoft in the queue.
A Google rep told Fierce that the company chooses submarine cable routes based on a variety of factors, including proximity to users, diversity from existing submarine cable routes, and routes that provide the lowest latency between the various locations. The rep added that implementing their own submarine cables allows them to effectively plan the future capacity needs of our customers and users around the world and add a layer of security beyond what is available on the public internet.
Firmina is expected to enter service in 2023, the representative said. For comparison, Google’s most recently launched private cable, Dunant, was announced in April 2019 and was ready for service by February 2021. Equiano and Grace Hopper, announced in June 2019 and July 2020 respectively, are yet to be operational.
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