Meta Platforms has introduced a plan to construct the world’s largest submarine telecommunications cable – and it’ll assist join South Africa to the world.
The cable, which is able to span greater than 50 000km – longer than the circumference of Earth – will join 5 continents and can utilise the “highest-capacity know-how accessible” immediately.
Known as Challenge Waterworth, the system will join the US, India, Brazil, South Africa and different key areas.
“This challenge will allow better financial cooperation, facilitate digital inclusion and open alternatives for technological improvement in these areas. For instance, in India, the place we’ve already seen important development and funding in digital infrastructure, Waterworth will assist speed up this progress and assist the nation’s formidable plans for its digital financial system,” Meta stated in a assertion.
A map revealed by Meta – see above – exhibits the deliberate route for the high-capacity cable, with features a touchdown station on South Africa’s southern shoreline. It stated building of the system will price a number of billions of {dollars}. It didn’t say when it expects building to start, or when the system will likely be prepared for service.
The brand new system can have 24 fibre pairs – considerably greater than the variety of fibre pairs present in most different undersea cable methods. Its deliberate building follows Meta’s involvement within the building of 2Africa, a large cable system that connects Africa, Europe and the Asian subcontinent.
Enhanced burial methods
“With Challenge Waterworth, we proceed to advance engineering design to take care of cable resilience, enabling us to construct the longest 24-fibre pair cable challenge on the earth and improve total pace of deployment,” Meta stated.
“We’re additionally deploying first-of-its-kind routing, maximising the cable laid in deep water – at depths of as much as 7 000m – and utilizing enhanced burial methods in high-risk fault areas, comparable to shallow waters close to the coast, to keep away from harm from ship anchors and different hazards.”
Information of Meta’s plans observe rival Google’s announcement final Could that it plans to construct a brand new cable system known as Umoja that can join South Africa and Australia. The deliberate construct follows Google’s completion of the Equiano cable that connects South Africa to Europe alongside Africa’s west coast.
Learn: Google’s large Equiano Web cable has landed in South Africa
The brand new cable system features a terrestrial leg constructed by Liquid Clever Applied sciences. “Anchored in Kenya, the Umoja cable route will move by way of Uganda, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa, together with the Google Cloud area, earlier than crossing the Indian Ocean to Australia,” Google stated on the time. — © 2025 NewsCentral Media
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