Lumen announced that it is investing in a pair of fibers on Google's Grace Hopper submarine cable, adding a sixth option to its lineup of transatlantic routes. The move builds on Lumen's earlier investment in Google's Dunant submarine fiber optic cable.
The Grace Hopper system will connect to Lumen landing stations at both ends and provide services from those points, Lumen said. These services will include wavelength capacity for global commercial and wholesale customers that can be scaled to meet demand.
"Data flows and capacity needs know no boundaries. the bandwidth explosion across continents is real and we are meeting it head on by investing in new submarine cables," said Laurinda Pang, Lumen's president of global customer success, in a statement.
Google announced plans for its Grace Hopper cable, which will connect New York and the British city of Bude in October this year, in 2020. Its Dunant cable system was announced in 2018 for launch in 2020. These systems are among the half-dozen private submarine cables owned by Google.
Lumen's move to add another transatlantic route comes after the company expanded its edge computing solution to Europe in July. At the time, Lumen said its solution would be able to meet approximately 70 percent of enterprise demand across the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands with a latency of 5 milliseconds.
