When Meta announced its plans for a vast new fiber optic network covering 50,000 kilometers and linking five continents last month, the company’s selling point was cutting-edge undersea cable tech. What went unsaid, however, was the geopolitical challenges the project might also face, along with potential insights it could reveal about Meta’s upcoming priorities.
The company is hardly alone as a private player extending long fiber optic routes across oceans. Last year Google, for instance, announced a US $1 billion investment in undersea cables connecting the U.S. to Japan. Titans like Meta and Google investing heavily in undersea cables represents “a trend we’ve been tracking for over a decade,” says Lane Burdette, senior analyst at the Washington, D.C.-based firm TeleGeography.
The challenge comes in piecing together technical details for each project, given the inevitably sketchy notes a company’s PR team provides. (Contacted by IEEE Spectrum, a Meta spokesperson declined to comment.)
Meta’s new cable will be called Waterworth, after a pioneering Meta engineer who passed away last year.
Waterworth hasn’t yet been added to TeleGeography’s comprehensive global submarine cable map, Burdette says, because no geographical routing plans for the fiber network have yet been announced. Once added, it’d join 81 other currently planned cable routes that TeleGeography does track across the planet, alongside the world’s other 570 undersea fiber optic cables now in service.
Meta’s Next 24-Fiber Pair Undersea Line
To help contextualize Meta’s news, says Howard Kidorf, managing partner at the Hoboken, N.J.-based analysis firm Pioneer Consulting, consider a point of reference: Laying cable from California to Singapore requires some 16,000 km of fiber. But going much beyond 16,000 km, he says, pushes the limits of cable tech today. “You lose capacity on each fiber pair as you go further,” he says. “So I could say 20,000 km, but then you’re running into an economic trade-off—losing total capacity.”
Tiny fiber optic amplifiers are typically built into the housings of undersea cables today. And powering that network of amplifiers can represent a real bottleneck constraining the maximum length of any given cable.
“It sounds like not a very challenging thing just to put more fibers in a cable,” Kidorf says. “But it’s also a bigger challenge to be able to put more optical amplifiers in. … And the biggest challenge on top of that is how do you power those optical amplifiers?”
Every 50 to 80 km, an optical amplifier inside the cable must boost the optical signal, according to Kidorf. Meanwhile, each repeater typically consumes 50 to 100 watts. Do the math, and at minimum a California-to-Singapore line needs at least 10 kilowatts coursing through it just to keep the lights on. (Real-world figures, Kidorf says, come out closer to 15 to 18 kW.)
“Unrepeatered cables can have over 100 fiber pairs across a single segment,” Burdette says. “But so far, the maximum fiber pairs used in a repeatered system is 24.”
Waterworth will be using all 24 fiber pairs of that present-day capacity. Which puts it at the forefront of undersea cable tech today—although Waterworth isn’t the first undersea 24-fiber cable Meta has laid down.
“Meta is expected to activate Anjana, the first 24-pair repeatered system, this year,” adds Burdette. “Anjana was supplied by NEC.” (Other 24-pair fiber cables with repeaters in them are also under development both by NEC and others, Burdette notes, although Meta now appears to be first in line to actually activate such a system.)
Anjana is less than 8,000 km—connecting Myrtle Beach, S.C. to Santander, Spain. It will yield the social media behemoth 480 terabits per second of new bandwidth between the U.S. and Europe.
Compared to the hypothetical California-to-Singapore cable, above, whose 16,000 km length would stretch existing fiber tech capabilities to the extreme, Anjana isn’t setting any underwater distance records. On the other hand, Waterworth’s anticipated 50,000 km span—more than six times that of Anjana—would represent quite a leap forward.
Perhaps that is why both Kidorf and Burdette wanted to clarify something about that 50,000 figure.
“50,000 is a nice headline number,” Kidorf says. “It is a lot of cable. It’s roughly the output of a single cable factory for an entire year. … But this is not one cable that goes 50,000 kilometers. It’s a cable that lands in a number of places for regeneration.”
“Waterworth is one project with multiple cable systems,” Burdette says. “This distinction can get kind of muddy as cable systems often have multiple segments that may even enter service at different times. So what makes something ‘one cable’ can come down to an issue of branding.”
Where Will Waterworth Make Landfall?
One outstanding Waterworth question, Kidorf says, concerns where and why the undersea cable will make landfall at its six or more landing points—according to Meta’s preliminary map (above).
According to Kidorf, geopolitics and tech collide where international hotspots are concerned. Nobody wants their expensive cable being damaged, either intentionally or accidentally, in a conflict zone.
“For example, connectivity to get from Asia to North America without going through the Red Sea is a major goal of everybody,” Kidorf says. Another goal, he adds, concerns avoiding the South China Sea.
In other words, it might be charitable to imagine Meta’s Brazilian, South African, and Indian landing points as a play to bridge the digital divide. But it’s probably not coincidence, Kidorf says, that Waterworth’s projected route also neatly circumnavigates the globe while still avoiding both of those two geopolitical tinderboxes.
What doesn’t yet make sense, he adds, is how Waterworth might “unlock AI innovation” (in the words of Meta’s press release) via these particular landing points. Because AI implies big data centers awaiting the cord coming out of the ocean.
Yet at least two inferred Waterworth landing points (from the approximate circles on Meta’s map) currently lack major Meta data centers, he says.
“Building data centers is a more significant investment in capital than building these cables are,” Kidorf says. “So not only do you need to build a data center, you have to find a way to power them. And India is a tough place to get 500 megawatts, which is what data centers are being built out as. Brazil also is not a data center capital.”
More Waterworth details will clearly be needed, that is, not only to place Waterworth on TeleGeography’s map but also to determine how the cable’s networking potential will be used—as well as how truly cutting-edge Waterworth’s tech specs may actually be.
“They didn’t provide enough detail to really say whether it’s a technological marvel or not, because the issue is how far can you go before you have to hit land?” Kidorf says. And returning to solid ground, he says, is the ultimate technological constraint.
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