The American internet and tech giant is headquartered in California.

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Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP / SIPA

  • Google's fiber optic cable runs from France to the United States.

  • It allows a transmission speed of 250 terabits per second, almost ten times the average for submarine cables.

It is called Dunant, in "honor of the Swiss Henry Dunant, founder of the Red Cross and first Nobel Peace Prize".

Google's private submarine cable, which links France to the United States through the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, has now come into service, the American group announced on Wednesday.

This 6,600-kilometer-long fiber optic connection stretches from Virginia Beach (Virginia) to Saint-Hilaire-de-Rietz (Vendée).

It will be operated in partnership with the French operator Orange.

The latter will benefit from two of the twelve pairs of optical fibers of the new cable, the rest going to Google.

Record capacity

“Dunant is the first long-haul submarine cable to feature 12-fiber spatial division multiplexing (MDS).

It will deliver a record capacity of 250 terabits per second (Tbps) across the ocean, enough to transmit the equivalent of the entire digital library of Congress three times per second, ”says Google.

"On its own, Dunant will represent half of the capacity installed on the Atlantic," Jean-Luc Vuillemin, director of international networks and services at Orange, said in March.

The work, which required the creation of submarine stations off the coasts of Vendée and Virgnie, lasted nearly a year.

Internet giants are weaving their web

The laying and operation of submarine cables, through which almost all of the world's Internet traffic passes, have long been the prerogative of major operators in the telecommunications sector united in consortia.

But the Internet giants (Google, Facebook, Microsoft) are becoming the new builders of these crucial infrastructures.

"It is about serving our internal needs and those of our customers who use our cloud services [cloud computing services, of which Google has become a global heavyweight]", explains Fabien Vieau, infrastructure director at Google.

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