Meta is building Petal, an undersea cable connecting France and the US. It will stretch about 7,000 km and deliver 1 petabit/s of capacity that’s 1,000 Tbps.
⏺ That’s more than twice Meta’s previous record: the Anjana cable between Spain and the US delivers around 480 Tbps.
💬 The key innovation is new multi-core fiber. Instead of a single core, each fiber will contain two. So 24 physical fiber pairs effectively become 48 optical channels.
💬 The cable will use around 100 underwater repeaters to boost the signal. It’s being built by NEC and Sumitomo Electric, with Orange receiving the cable in France. Launch is planned for 2029.
⏺ For scale, Meta says the capacity could let three-quarters of the world’s population listen to music simultaneously. Although at 160 kbps MP3 quality. Sorry, audiophiles no lossless. 😅
The interesting part: while everyone is talking about AI chips and massive data centers, the global internet still relies on cables sitting on the ocean floor.
And tech giants increasingly want to own that infrastructure themselves rather than rent it from telecom operators.
Now the real question: will sharks approve of the two-core fiber, or stick with the classic? 🦈
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