News

Google Launches Its Dunant Subsea Cable Between The US And Europe

Published

6 years ago

February 9, 2021

Google

With Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites quickly filling up Earth’s orbit and promising low latency, broadband internet access to people living in the most remote corners of the world, it’s easy to forget that physical cables stretched across the ocean floor are still indispensable information super-highways.

Google, in partnership with telecommunications equipment company SubCom, has just announced the completion of one such super-highway between the United States and Europe. Called Dunant, this privately-owned subsea cable spans almost 4,000 miles (6,400 km) from Virginia Beach in the US to Saint-Hilaire-de-Riez, France, offering record-breaking data transfer capacity of 250 terabits per second (Tbps).

Submarine Cable Map

“We’re thrilled to say bonjour to the Dunant submarine cable system, which has been deployed and tested and is now ready for service,” writes Chris Ciauri, Google’s President for EMEA, in a blog post.

“The historic landing was made possible in partnership with SubCom, a global partner for undersea data transport, which engineered, manufactured, and installed the Dunant system on schedule despite the ongoing global pandemic.”

The two companies decided to name the subsea cable after Henry Dunant, a Swiss humanitarian, businessman, and social activist who received the first Nobel Peace Prize (together with Frédéric Passy) in 1901.

Google first announced the project in 2018 and expected to complete it in late 2020. The delay was caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The tech giant, whose recent record quarterly revenues were largely caused by soaring cloud sales, is also working on a subsea cable between Portugal and South Africa, called Equiano.

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“This new cable is fully funded by Google, making it our third private international cable after Dunant and Curie, and our 14th subsea cable investment globally,” stated Michael D. Francois, Tech Lead Manager of Global Network Infrastructure at Google. “Equiano will be the first subsea cable to incorporate optical switching at the fiber-pair level, rather than the traditional approach of wavelength-level switching.”

Both Dunant and Equiano are part of Google’s ongoing effort to improve its cloud network infrastructure and offer better reliability, speed, and security to its customers.

News

Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon

Foreign visitors will be the first users to benefit, but whether Syria’s own banks and cardholders follow is still an open question.

Published

2 weeks ago

August 27, 2026

Dana Saadeh

visa's return to syria starts with a test and a bank in lebanon

Visa is returning to Syria. Its first live international card transaction in the country was a test rather than a launch, and the milestone event ran through a Lebanese bank.

The acquirer (the bank on the merchant’s side of a card payment) was Fransabank Lebanon, with Paymera as the other named partner. Nadim Moujaes, who heads a Fransabank Group subsidiary, describes the test as both the culmination of “longstanding efforts to link Syria back to international payment networks” and “the first step in a larger path”.

Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa makes the first electronic payment in Syria using a @Visa card at a store in Damascus, following the lifting of US sanctions on Syria. pic.twitter.com/lpAN7nQ6Fc

— Tech Magazine (@TechMGZN) August 27, 2026

“We are excited to have successfully tested live transactions today as we plan to enable international visitors to use their Visa cards while in Syria,” says Leila Serhan, Visa’s senior vice president and group country manager for the North Africa, Levant and Pakistan region. Although a significant first step, that plan doesn’t come with a hard date for when a visitor’s card will work normally.

Mohammed Safwat Raslan, governor of the Central Bank of Syria, says the test paves the way for international card acceptance in Syria and that maintaining strong compliance, risk management and operational controls will remain essential. Serhan likewise stresses that Visa has worked within applicable legal, regulatory and compliance requirements. For a test transaction, it seems there was a great deal of attention paid to the rules, with the entire operation being carefully managed.

Also Read: Lebanon’s 5G Era Begins With 150 Stations And A $1M Budget

The test is the latest step in a sequence that began in December 2025, when Visa announced a strategic roadmap to support Syria’s integration into the global digital economy. In February 2026 it hosted its first industry gathering of banks, ecosystem partners and policymakers in Damascus and, the same month, signed an agreement with Syria’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in San Francisco.

Michel Kattouah, Paymera’s CEO, called the test “the return of international card acceptance,” but while that’s positive news, there’s no word yet on when a Syrian bank will issue a Visa card to a Syrian customer.