Under the sea: Building Google’s fiber optic network
Stephanie Wong
Global Lead, Developer Programs
Fiber optic networks are a foundation of the modern internet. In fact, subsea cables carry 99% of international network traffic, and yet we are barely aware that they exist. What you might not know is that the first subsea cable was deployed in 1858 for telegraph messages between Europe and North America. A message took over 17 hours to deliver, at 2 minutes and 5 seconds per letter by Morse code.
Today, a single cable can deliver a whopping 340 Tbps capacity; that’s more than 25 million times faster than the average home internet connection. Over the years at Google, we have worked with partners around the world to engineer more capacity into the fiber optics that can be underground or laid at the bottom of the ocean. It takes an impressive combination of physics, marine technology, and engineering, which is why...
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