Facebook's World Spanning Waterworth Subsea Cable

This past autumn I did a post based on two insider conversations about an under-the-radar Facebook cable that would span the world with a W shape. I was told the cable would directly dconnect the US to South Africa and then head straight to India and onward to Australia before landing on the West Coast of the US. My theory at the time was that this was an AI driven project since the routing really didn't match Internet traffic flows or even connect to major Internet exchange points. The purported route latencies would be quite high. So I figured its purpose was to move 'Big Data'. I am surprised to say I was right. 

The one deviation from my initial understanding is that the cable will land in Brazil before veering for South Africa. A Brazil landing makes perfect sense in retrospect because Facebook's current capacity down to South America is limited. It may have a fibre pair on Google's Firmina cable, but I've seen no announcements or acknowledgements to support that idea. Again, I speculate this cable will be used to move large data sets to AI data centers for number crunching and then distribution to end users in these same countries. The same data centers used to estimate these statistical AI models could also serve as distribution nodes. In general, AI network architecture has large data centers that estimate (train is the new buzz word) thes AI models. Then the finished product, the estimated statistical model, is distributed to edge nodes that serve the ultimate customers. 

It is worth noting that META did not corroborate THE crazy rumor that this cable would cost $10 billion. a figure that seems to me totally outlandish. It is pretty obvious who spread this silly rumor: a certain undersea cable consultancy in Silicon Valley. The META press release did say it was a multi-billion dollar project. My guess is that $2 billion is a plausible figure given the per kilometer cost of other complicated, high fibre count cables like 2Africa. It is highly likely that the power conductor will be aluminum as opposed to copper as this is a standard feature of Facebook-led cable projects. There will probably be carrier interest in two segments, namely the lower latency USA/Brazil and also the Australia/USA route. In contrast, there is little carrier traffic between South American and South Africa or South Africa and India. Resiliency and diversity were obbviously high desing priorities as Waterworth will avoid major choke points such as Egypt, the Red Sea, and Singapore.