Meta says it is going to invest multiple billions of dollars over the next few years to build a new subsea internet cable that will span 50,000 kilometers, longer than the Earth’s circumference, and reach five major continents.
Project Waterworth, as it is called, is Meta’s first undersea cable project that it is developing on its own without partners. The company says it will be using a “first-of-its-kind routing” technique and enhanced burial techniques to maximize the amount of cable that can be laid in deep water, where it is less at risk of being damaged by passing ships or other hazards.
Even though the internet is sort of like air these days, permeating the world around us through spectrum radio, the way it gets across continents is quite analog. The vast majority of internet traffic traveling between continents transits through subsea internet cables—basically like really long Ethernet cables. The essential nature of subsea cables for communication and electricity has made them prime targets of attack in recent years as countries like Russia have been linked to the sabotage of cables, like a recent cut of a Baltic cable, using a fleet of “ghost vessels.” The attacks disrupt adversaries and sow chaos as countries see what they can get away with (Russia denied involvement in the recent incident).
Meta’s suite of apps including Facebook and Instagram accounts for a large amount of daily internet activity, and the company invests heavily in infrastructure to ensure its services are fast and reliable. In that sense it is not surprising the company would want to build out a cable that can support its services and let it control data transmission.
Netflix spent years building out its own content delivery network including data centers and appliances it provides to internet service providers around the world where shows and movies can be cached so content reaches users as quickly as possible without straining the network, after years of complaints from ISPs about its use of bandwidth. That is also why Netflix dropped its support for net neutrality rules years ago; it didn’t need the protection anymore. It was sued by a South Korean ISP back in 2021, however, which complained the popularity of Squid Game was causing network problems. Netflix and other streamers have to pay special network fees there to help ISPs.
Meta spent a lot of time in its announcement of Project Waterworth talking up the future of AI. The company, like the rest of Big Tech, thinks that everyone is going to be using new AI tools soon, which will lead to a flood of new demand for data centers. The cables are the backbone infrastructure that will ensure it has the bandwidth it needs to transmit all that new data.
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