Firmina to have 12 fibre pairs for carrying traffic between the two regions
Firmina will be made up of 12 fibre pairs for carrying traffic between North and South America. (Credit: Ulrike Leone from Pixabay)
Google announced that it will undertake a new open subsea cable project dubbed Firmina for connecting Latin America and the US with an objective to boost access to its services for users in South America.
The undersea cable will traverse from the US East Coast to Las Toninas in Argentina. It will have additional landings in Praia Grande in Brazil and Punta del Este in Uruguay.
Firmina will comprise 12 fibre pairs to quickly and securely carry traffic between North and South America. The open subsea cable project will provide fast, low-latency access to users to Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, Google Cloud services, and other Google products.
According to Google, Firmina will be the longest cable in the world that can operate completely from a single power source at one end of the cable in case of its other power source(s) being temporarily unavailable.
The internet giant said that single-end power source capability is crucial for reliability and apart from that is the main priority for its network.
Apart from Firmina, Google has investments in 15 more subsea cables. These include Dunant, Grace Hopper, and Equiano and consortium cables such as Echo, INDIGO, JGA, and Havfrue.
In February 2021, Google announced that the Dunant subsea cable, which connects the US and mainland Europe, has been deployed, tested, and ready for service.
The following month, in March, the internet giant announced an investment in the Echo subsea cable, which will be built between Eureka in California and Singapore. Google joined social media major Facebook in the Echo undersea cable project that will have a stop-over in Guam in Micronesia and also a potential landing in Indonesia.