SubCom says it has received a contract from Google for the design, manufacture, and deployment of the Firmina submarine cable. The undersea network will connect the East Coast of the United States to Las Toninas, Argentina, with additional landings in Praia Grande, Brazil, and Punta del Este, Uruguay.
The 12-fiber-pair Firmina submarine cable will leverage SubCom’s 18-kV power technology and will be the world's longest undersea cable capable of maintaining operations with single-end feed power, SubCom asserts. The presence of a single-end power source capability improves reliability and overall system resilience, the company adds.
Subcom will manufacture of the cable and equipment at its manufacturing campus in Newington, NH, during 2021 and early 2022. Main lay installation operations should begin in Summer 2022. Firmina is expected to be ready for service by the end of 2023.
Google named the cable after Maria Firmina dos Reis (1825 - 1917), a mixed-race Brazilian abolitionist and author. “As people and businesses have come to depend on digital services for many aspects of their lives, Firmina will improve access to Google services for users in South America,” commented Bikash Koley, vice president, global networking, Google Cloud, wrote in a blog post about the project. “With 12 fiber pairs, the cable will carry traffic quickly and securely between North and South America, giving users fast, low-latency access to Google products such as Search, Gmail and YouTube, as well as Google Cloud services.”
“It is our privilege to once again partner with Google to supply a high-speed, high-capacity undersea cable system that will encompass some of the most advanced transmission technologies in the world,” added David Coughlan, CEO of SubCom. “Our organization is built to take on the connectivity challenges that our customers present to us regularly. Having invested heavily in our R&D and manufacturing capabilities, SubCom is able to develop systems that meet the exacting demands of the world’s most active service providers, and to leverage the industry’s most advanced fleet of cable ships to deploy them.”
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