Lumen Technologies announced it is investing in a fiber pair on Google’s Grace Hopper subsea cable, adding a sixth option to its lineup of trans-Atlantic routes. The move builds on Lumen’s earlier investment in Google’s Dunant subsea cable.
In a press release, Lumen said the Grace Hopper system will connect to a Lumen landing station on either end and deliver its services from those points. These will include wavelength capacity for global business and wholesale customers which can be scaled to meet demand.
"Data flow and capacity demands don't know boundaries. The bandwidth explosion across continents is real and we're meeting it head on by investing in new subsea cables," Lumen’s president of global customer success Laurinda Pang said in a statement.
Google announced plans for its Grace Hopper cable, which is set to connect New York to the U.K. city of Bude this October, in 2020. It’s Dunant cable system was announced in 2018 and launched in 2020. The systems are among the half dozen private subsea cables owned by Google.
Lumen’s move to add another trans-Atlantic route follows the company’s expansion of its edge compute solutions to Europe in July. At the time, Lumen indicated its solutions would be able to meet approximately 70% of enterprise demand across the U.K., France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands within 5 milliseconds of latency.
In July 2021, Pang told Fierce Lumen was planning to ramp its focus on Europe, plotting investments in key growth areas.