News

Google’s 3,900-Mile Grace Hopper Undersea Cable Lands In The UK

Undersea cables are the backbone of the internet, carrying around 98% of international traffic.

Published

5 years ago

September 17, 2021

Joanna Melki

google's 3900 mile grace hopper undersea cable lands in the uk

Google Cloud

Google has a good reason to celebrate this week because the tech giant has successfully completed its 3,900-mile undersea cable. The cable is named Grace Hopper, after the American computer scientist who was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, and it connects New York (United States) to Bude (United Kingdom) and Bilbao (Spain).

Google

The Spanish branch was completed earlier in September as the first-ever Google-funded route to Spain. Now that the UK branch has landed as well, the mission, which was first announced last July, has reached its end.

“Grace Hopper represents a new generation of the trans-Atlantic cable coming to the UK shores and is one of the first new cables to connect the US and the UK since 2003,” says Google in the official announcement. “Grace Hopper will connect the UK to help meet the rapidly growing demand for high-bandwidth connectivity and services”.

The cable uses a cutting-edge multi-directional fiber switching architecture that lets Google better move traffic around outages and provide the reliability necessary to power critical Google services like Meet, Gmail, and Google Cloud.

The multi-directional fiber switching architecture will also help tightly integrate the upcoming Google Cloud region in Madrid into Google’s global infrastructure. The new region will leverage Telefonica’s Madrid region infrastructure to foster Spain’s digital transformation and advance 5G mobile edge computing.

Also Read: Carrefour City+ In Mall Of The Emirates Becomes Dubai’s First Contactless Store

Undersea cables like Grace Hopper are the backbone of the internet, carrying around 98% of international traffic. The first optical telecommunications cables were laid on the ocean floor back in the 1980s, and their number has since then grown to more than 400. The actual optical fibers that carry data between continents are only as thick as a single strand of human hair, but they’re protected by several layers of shielding and isolation.

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.