Cable manufacturer SubCom is manufacturing Firmina fiber optic cable this year and will install it in 2022. It should start transmitting data in 2023.

A ship laid a Google submarine cable

Google is building a new submarine cable to transmit your megabits of data between the eastern United States, Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. The fiber optic line is named Firmina after the Brazilian abolitionist and will start operation in 2023.

"The Internet infrastructure is not in the cloud, but under the sea," said Bikash Koley, Google's vice president of global networking. Firmina is the 16th submarine cable built or invested by Google. "The Internet is still growing steadily year by year. I hope this train can continue," he said.

Increasing capacity is important to adapt to consumer services such as search, Gmail and YouTube, and business infrastructure such as Google Cloud. Google said that about 98% of international data is transmitted through submarine cables across the seabed. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, the number of Google Meet video conferences surged 25 times.

Like the daily Google Doodles, Google also pays tribute to famous people with the name of its submarine cable. This telegram is named after the mixed-race writer Maria Firmina dos Reis, who described the lives of African-Brazilian slaves in the 1859 novel Ursula. Google also used Google Doodle to highlight her 194th birthday in 2019.

Google names its submarine cables in alphabetical order-mainly. Its recently announced submarine cable is called Grace Hopper, named after the pioneer of computer scientists and the discoverer of actual errors in early computers. "The sequence is a bit off," Coley said of the naming order. The earlier Google cables were named Curie, Dunant, and Equiano.

Google did not share the expected data capacity of the cable, but it will transmit thousands of miles of data over 12 pairs of fiber optic lines. In contrast, a Grace Hopper fiber optic cable with 16 pairs has a capacity of 250 TB per second, of which 16 pairs of optical fibers connect the United States with the United Kingdom and Spain.

Google's Firmina submarine cable line will connect the United States with Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina.

This is about 250,000 times faster than high-speed gigabit per second broadband using fiber optic lines. Koley said that submarine cables can fill more data by using more fiber optic lines and more expensive terminals that use more optical frequencies and other signal processing techniques to compress more data.

Google hired SubCom to design and install the cables. SubCom said in a statement that it will produce cables at its plant in New Hampshire, New Hampshire this year, and install the cables in the summer of 2022.

Submarine cables must increase signal strength every 100 kilometers (62 miles), and power lines bundled in the cables provide power. Coley said that an unusual aspect of Firina is that it can be powered from either end of the cable, which improves reliability compared to more common designs that always rely on power from both ends.

This method, called single-ended feed by SubCom, requires 18 kilowatts of power—about 20% higher than traditional designs. SubCom expects that Firmina will be the longest cable using this technology.

Google has not yet selected a site for U.S. cable terminals. Its southern destinations are Las Toninas in Argentina, Praia Grande in Brazil and Punta del Este in Uruguay.

Google has established partnerships with other cable operators to exchange capacity for similar routes to strengthen the overall grid of communication links.