Data flows under the oceans. To get from the US to Europe, for example, internet traffic doesn’t beam by satellite—it rushes through subsea cables. There are about 378 of these pipes, and the information that travels through them does so on glass fiber. While many of these tubes cross the Atlantic, Google is building a new one that they say will be the highest-capacity cable to snake under that ocean. Here’s what to know about how it will work.
The cable will be called Dunant—after the founder of the Red Cross, Henry Dunant—and it will stretch from the United States to France over some 3,977 miles. Since it’s a private Google cable, it will (unsurprisingly) be a part of Google’s network, connecting data centers, carrying internal data, and more. All of that means that if you’re in the US and you send an email to someone in Europe, the information for that note could someday travel over this cable.
Dunant will be the highest-capacity cable across the Atlantic. In fact, it will be able to transmit 250 terabits of data per second. Compare that to another impressive subsea cable, called Marea, that’s rated for 160 terabits per second.
The company is making that happen in a way that’s both simple and complex. Here’s the simple part: undersea cables, like Marea, carry their goods through pairs of fiber optic strands. Marea, for example, has 8 pairs, or 16 fibers total. Each pair is like a two-lane road, with traffic going in one direction in one fiber and the opposite in the other.
Dunant will carry more data because it will pack more fiber pairs in there: it will have 12 pairs, or 24 strands in total. In a basic sense, it will transport more information the same way a bigger, wider highway allows more cars and trucks to drive down it.
Source by Popular Science
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