In July 2021, exec Laurinda Pang told Fierce Lumen was planning to ramp its focus on Europe, plotting investments in key growth areas.
Lumen Technologies has stated that it will invest in a fibre pair on Google’s Grace Hopper underwater cable, giving it a sixth trans-Atlantic route choice. Lumen’s previous investment in Google‘s Dunant subsea cable was leveraged in this move.
Lumen stated in a news release that the Grace Hopper system will connect to a Lumen landing station on each end and deliver its services from there. These will contain wavelength capacity that can be increased to meet the demand for global corporate and wholesale customers.
“Data flow and capacity demands have no bounds. The bandwidth surge across continents is real, and we’re responding by investing in additional subsea cables “Laurinda Pang, Lumen’s president of global customer success, said in a statement.
Google revealed its plans for its Grace Hopper cable, which is set to connect New York to the U.K. city of Bude this October 2020. Its Dunant cable system was announced in 2018 and launched in 2020. The systems are among the half dozen private subsea cables owned by Google.
A Google representative told the company chooses “subsea cable routes based on a variety of factors, including proximity to users, diversity from existing subsea cable paths, and routes that provide the lowest latency between various locations.” The representative added deploying its own subsea cables allows it “to plan effectively for the future capacity needs of our customers and users around the world, and add a layer of security beyond what’s available over the public internet.”
Lumen’s decision to create another trans-Atlantic route comes on the heels of the company’s July extension of its edge compute solutions to Europe. Lumen stated at the time that its solutions would be able to service about 70% of enterprise demand in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands within 5 milliseconds of delay.
Pang told Fierce Lumen in July 2021 that the company was increasing its attention on Europe and planning investments in key growth areas.