The cable is expected to cost up to $10 billion in total with its W-shaped route avoiding geopolitical hotspots and single points of failure
Meta is planning to construct a 40,000km subsea network that will span the globe, TechCrunch reports, dedicated to traffic from its own operations and platforms including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. It is expected that traffic will rise in line with increased use of AI and, wait for it, metaverse applications.
The plan was flagged in October by Sunil Tagare in a blog on LinkedIn. He has a long history in the subsea cable industry and entitled the blog, Meta’s $2 Billion Mother Of All Submarine Cables For AI Will Forever Change India. It’s reckoned that the initial cost will be about $2 billion, rising to between $5 billion and $10 billion over the next five to ten years.
Routing logic
Tagare followed that initial blog up to explain why Meta is calling its proposed infrastructure W – see map here. The route will form a rough W starting from the US’ east coast, to Cape Town then Mumbai with an offshoot to Chenai, before landing at Darwin in northern Australia with the last leg back to the the US west coast.
In other words, avoiding the trouble spots of the Red Sea where subsea cables have been attacked and northern Europe which has experienced cut cables recently. It also avoids the South China Sea which is between China and Taiwan, and whose ownership is hotly contested by several countries including Vietnam. It is regarded as one of the issues most likely to spark conflict in Asia.
Single points of failure
Tagare also points out that the Red Sea, the South China Sea, Egypt, Marseille, the Straits of Malacca and Singapore are all also single points of failure. There has been an acceleration in cable building in the last five years, and a spate of recent announcements to address some of those hotspots and single points of failure, such as by Saudi’s Mobily and Italy’s international infrastructure firm Sparkle, and Mobily and Egypt.
It is likely there will be more as terrorism and state-sponsored attacks threaten to proliferate, and the threats will put air under the wings of the satellite industry too.