Findings on Google's Curie Cable System Ready for Service

Google announced Curie's ready for service on November 15, 2019. According to Google's announcement, Curie cable is 10,500 kilometers long, running from the United States to Chile. And Google is adding the first Curie branch into Panama, to be supplied by SubCom as well. Curie cable system is equipped with four fiber pairs, each of 18 Tbps, delivering 72 Tbps of much needed bandwidth to South America. Curie landed in Valparaiso, Chile last April, and was the first subsea cable to connect to Chile in 19 years. 

Curie is the first private intercontinental subsea cable invested by Google.  Curie cable system have been successfully installed and tested. In the announcement, Google says they are connecting Curie to its network and expect the private cable to begin transmitting data in Q2 2020.

There are more interesting findings on Google's annoucement and Cure's ready for service.

First, the announcement was titled "Google’s Curie private subsea cable is ready for service between the U.S. and Chile, with a branch to Panama" in Google search results, as shown in Figure 1. But actually, the title of the announcement is now "Curie subsea cable set to transmit to Chile, with a pit stop to Panama" at Google's official website, as shown in Figure 2. And in this announcement, there isn't any wording “ready for service”.  Anyone familiar with Google search would be quite curious at these findings. 

Second, let's have a look at Curie's landing in the United States.

According to  the FCC's public notices, the FCC granted on December 21, 2018 a 180-day's Special Temporary Authority("STA”) for Google to construct, connect, and test the portion of the Curie cable system in U.S. territory prior to the Commission's grant of the Applicant’s (Google) pending cable landing license application. Upon Google's request, the FCC granted on June 13, 2019 an extention of the aforesaid Special Temporary Authority("STA”) for another 180 days.

Further according to the FCC's public notices, the FCC finally completed the Grant of Authority and granted Google the final Submarine Cable Landing License for Curie cable system on September 20, 2019.

Anyway, the Curie cable system has been ready for service and qualified for transmitting data. Good news.