Meta is planning to build the world’s longest undersea cable, aiming to connect the US, India, South Africa, Brazil and other regions.
The owner of Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp will build a 50,000km (31,000-mile) cable, which is longer than the Earth’s circumference, to make sure artificial intelligence and other new technologies are accessible around the world, it said in a blog post.
Project Waterworth will open “three new oceanic corridors with the abundant, high-speed connectivity needed to drive AI innovation around the world,” wrote Meta on its engineering blog.
Subsea cables are described as the “backbone of the internet” by the Global Digital Inclusion Partnership, a group trying to get the world’s population “meaningfully connected” to the internet by 2030.
It reports around 95% of internet traffic travels through these cables, but access to the huge network is patchy, which impacts society’s most marginalised groups.
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“As subsea cables increase data traffic competition and bandwidth availability, the price for each gigabyte of data decreases,” wrote the group in a report on the topic last year.
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“Addressing the affordability barrier may offer key benefits for individuals on lower incomes who are more price sensitive – most of whom are women, people living in rural areas, or other marginalized groups (e.g., people with disabilities).”
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Meta has already developed more than 20 subsea cables, while rival tech billionaire Elon Musk is using parades of low-orbit satellites to increase internet connectivity.
His Starlink satellites have a different purpose, however. They connect remote, hard-to-reach areas to the internet where cables would struggle to reach.
Stargazers can sometimes spot his train of satellites making their way across the night sky after they have been launched, with some of the eerie light chains being spotted over the UK in recent years.
Meta’s new subsea cable project is predicted to cost billions of dollars and take years to complete. The company described it as its “most ambitious subsea cable endeavor yet”.
