Fibre optic subsea cables are the backbone of modern internet infrastructure. They span continents and help us achieve the dream of a 24x7 connected world. As per the latest news, Meta wants to make a big addition to the list of subsea cables.
The social media giant plans to lay a super long fibre optic subsea internet cable, which is expected to cost over $10 billion and have a 40,000+ km length spanning across the world, TechCrunch reports citing unnamed sources close to the company.
Meta is no stranger to subsea cable systems. The company has been a part-owner of more than a dozen such projects, according to data curated by Telegeography. Its latest investment was in the 2Africa cable that partially wraps around the African continent and is co-owned by China Mobile, Orange, Saudi Telecom, Vodafone, and others.
For comparison, Google is involved in 30+ submarine cable projects and owns several of them. Meanwhile, Microsoft has been involved in a comparatively lesser number of projects, with just six publicly announced cables as of June 2024, where it's a major capacity buyer in a couple of them.
This project is the first of its kind for Meta and is in the early stages of development. Meta is expected to talk about it publicly sometime in 2025 and hopefully provide detailed information about its intended route, capacity, and why it wants to lay such a long cable whose sole owner and user will be Meta itself.
Subsea cable expert and Flag Telecom founder Sunil Tagare was the first to spill the beans about the cable earlier this year. The cable is expected to have a starting budget of $2 billion and cross $10 billion as the work progresses.
Meta's cable will make the shape of a "W" across the globe. It will start from the US East Coast to India (via South Africa) and end up on the US West Coast (via Australia). There could be various reasons motivating the company to start such a project.
Firstly, Meta will have the entire pipeline to transport web traffic and ensure quality of service for its properties, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Meta. Data suggests Meta accounts for 22% of all mobile traffic and 10% of all fixed-line traffic.
A source told the publication that the planned route for Meta's subsea cable is intended to "avoid areas of geopolitical tension." According to Tagare's previous blog post, the cable will dodge the "Red Sea, the South China Sea and more importantly Egypt, Marseilles, the Straits of Malacca and Singapore -- all of whom are now major single points of failure."
Moreover, it's a speculation, but fulfilling its AI dreams could be another motivation for Meta. The company could use India as a testbed to train its AI models and lease or build AI data centre capacity. Tagare notes that the cost of compute bandwidth in India is a fraction of that in the US.
Sources told the publication that it's too early to conclude whether AI will be an important aspect of the project and whether it will open up the cable to others. With that said, it might be years before the cable becomes operational.
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