SubCom and Google this week announced that the deployment and testing of the Dunant submarine cable system has been completed and the system is ready for service.
Dunant is the first long-haul subsea cable to feature a 12 fiber pair space-division multiplexing (SDM) design, which will enable it to deliver record-breaking capacity of 250 terabits per second (Tbps) across the Atlantic Ocean. The second in a series of cable systems that Google has contracted with SubCom, Dunant was designed, manufactured and installed within its expected timeframe despite the myriad challenges presented by the global pandemic.
Dunant crosses the Atlantic Ocean between Virginia Beach in the U.S. and Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez on the French Atlantic coast. The system expands Google’s global network to add dedicated capacity, diversity and resilience, while enabling interconnection to other network infrastructure in the region.
To achieve a capacity of 250 Tbps, enough to transmit the entire digitized Library of Congress three times every second, SubCom is the first to market using SDM technology to increase cable capacity in a cost-effective manner with additional fiber pairs (twelve, rather than six or eight in past generations of subsea cables) and power-optimized repeater designs. While previous subsea cable technologies relied on a dedicated set of pump lasers to amplify each fiber pair, the SDM technology used in Dunant allows pump lasers and associated optical components to be shared among multiple fiber pairs. This ‘pump sharing’ technology enables more fibers within the cable while also providing higher system availability.
Mark Sokol, Senior Director of Infrastructure, Google Cloud
With record-breaking capacity and transmission speeds, Dunant will help users access content wherever they may be and supplement one of the busiest routes on the internet to support the growth of Google Cloud.
David Coughlan, CEO of SubCom
Our companies not only delivered another well-provisioned, high-bandwidth, low-latency, and highly secure connection between the U.S. and Europe, but we did so during a global pandemic that required unprecedented levels of cooperation, flexibility, and dedication.