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Meta have planned a 40,000km cable that stretches across the world, and it could cost them up to $10,000,000,000 by the time it's finished.
Being the company behind mega sites like Facebook and Instagram it's only natural that Meta feels the need to create enough bandwidth to sustain the traffic.
It is understood that the company is the second biggest internet traffic driver behind the behemoth that is Google, so it would end up being pretty handy to have their own way to hold, route, and direct those clicks around the world.
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While the 2Africa cable is already underway at Meta in partnership with Orange and Vodafone, they're reportedly planning a more significant project that could see a solo-produced cable stretch around the entire world.
Reported by TechCrunch, it is apparent that Meta have a 40,000km cable in their sites that would travel under water all the way across the world, supporting a massive amount of traffic for both their social media and AI efforts.
This cable would be solely produced, maintained, and used by Meta, giving them a significant amount of bandwidth within the internet world and entrepreneur Sunil Tagare reported via Linkedin that the cost could be between $2 billion and $10 billion.
Tagare also alleged that the project and cable have been called "W", which is a reference to its shape across the globe.
Starting on the east coast of the United States, the cable will then route straight to India via South Africa, and then back to the west coast of America through Darwin, Australia.
What remains critical to this route is that it avoids what Tagare calls 'major single points of failure' in the ocean, which include the Red Sea, South China Sea, and Egypt, Marseille, the Straits of Malacca, and Singapore.
This is to the do with risks of attack or disruption within these high-traffic geopolitically unstable areas, and while it does come at the cost of latency, the long term security of this action will hopefully make up for that.
Don't get your hopes up too much for the near future though, as it's estimated that the first equipment for the project won't be available until at least the 2029-30 range.
Some have raised concerns about Meta's dominance over the cable, as they have followed Google's actions with their Grace Hopper cable that stretched between New York and Cornwall, but it remains yet to be seen whether Facebook's parent company will open up the gates in the future.
