News

Google Launches Its Dunant Subsea Cable Between The US And Europe

Published

8 months ago

February 9, 2021

Joanna

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

Facebook Will Create 10,000 Jobs In The EU To Build Its Metaverse

Facebook decided to invest in the EU because the company believes that European talent is world-leading, supported by first-class universities.

Published

11 hours ago

October 21, 2021

David

facebook will create 10,000 jobs in the eu to build its metaverse

Getty Images

Facebook has announced that it wants to create 10,000 jobs in the European Union (EU) to build its metaverse, a virtual reality space in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users.

The concept of the metaverse can be traced to Neal Stephenson’s 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash. In the novel, the metaverse is a virtual shared space that appears to its users as an urban environment. This space is accessed through personal terminals connected to virtual reality goggles.

Sound familiar? That’s because the metaverse is quickly becoming a reality thanks to companies like Oculus, a subsidiary of Facebook, and the combined effort of developers and content creators from around the world.

By creating thousands of new high-skilled jobs within the EU over the next five years, Facebook wants to accelerate the development of the metaverse to usher in a new phase of interconnected virtual experiences, enabled by technologies like virtual and augmented reality.

“At its heart is the idea that by creating a greater sense of ‘virtual presence,’ interacting online can become much closer to the experience of interacting in person,” said Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice-president of global affairs. “The metaverse has the potential to help unlock access to new creative, social and economic opportunities”.

According to the official announcement, Facebook decided to invest in the EU because the company believes that European talent is world-leading, supported by first-class universities. Facebook also mentioned the role European policymakers are playing in shaping the internet, so it’s likely that the investment has a political dimension to it.

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Aware of its tarnished reputation, the social media giant stressed that no single company would own and operate the metaverse — just like no single company owns the internet today. Of course, that doesn’t change anything about the fact that Facebook wants to play a huge role in it.

Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg told his employees that Facebook is becoming a metaverse company with the goal of building a set of connected social apps and supporting hardware. The recently released Horizon Workrooms remote collaboration app for the Oculus Quest 2 headset can be seen as an early piece of the much larger puzzle the metaverse will become in the future.