The period just before PTC each year is always a big week for submarine cable announcements, and 2018 appears to be no exception. Another big new intercontinental project was unveiled yesterday, this time connecting the Americas. TE SubCom has been selected by Google to design and deploy the Curie Submarine Cable, named after the scientist Marie Curie.
The proposed system will stretch along the western coast of the two continents and connect Los Angeles, California with Valparaiso, Chile via 4-fiber-pairs, with a possible branch to Panama. We haven’t seen a new cable built in this area in a while, with nothing new landing in Chile since the dot com bubble. If all goes well, the Curie system will be ready sometime in 2019.
But perhaps the biggest news here is that Google is not just the mover behind the scenes, but will apparently own and operate the cable system all by itself. They are also involved in the HAVFRUE project in the north Atlantic as well as the HK-G cable system between Hong Kong and Guam, and they’ve had a finger in just about every submarine cable pie lately it seems. But not until now have they stepped up to the plate alone.
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Categories: Undersea cables
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Any word if this will be purely internal, or will capacity be available to third parties?
The Havfrue cable connecting the US to Denmark and Ireland and the Hong-Kong-Guam cable, are part of consortium deals. The third, the Curie cable connecting the US to Chile, will be privately operated by Google. The cables are generally intended to improve the performance of the company’s cloud computing infrastructure, with Curie being the first subsea cable commissioned by a major non-telecommunications company