Meta's Waterworth Update

1. The Waterworth cable will link the US to South Africa with a branching unit to Brazil. It extends from South Africa to India & onto to the Pacific and the US. The total length is greater than the Earth's circumference at approximately 50,000 kilometers.

2. Subsea cable projects are taking 3 to 5 years from initial idea to commercial service.

3. US traffic goes to Europe. It's aggregated with European originated traffic and then traverses the Mediterranean Sea to reach Egypt and takes terrestrial routes (Telecom Egypt) to the Red Sea. Then the traffic flows down the Red Sea. From there it either heads to India or bypasses it with Southeast Asia being the destination.

4. In the eyes of Facebook's subsea engineering team, the standard cable routing described above creates a host of problems. First of all , the Red Sea is a single point of failure. Same holds for Egypt. Secondly, the Mediterranean Sea requires many government permits as cables inevitably goes through territorial waters. Thirdly, standard routing raises costs as cables spend a lot of their time in shallow waters that require burial and will inevitably lead to outages.

5. The Facebook team estimates 3% of subsea cable damage happens in the deep sea, defined as 3000 to 5000 meters. So approximately 97% takes place in the shallow waters above the continental shelves.

6. The Waterworth project aims to keep the cable in the deep sea as much as possible to reduce permitting, damage and outages, and construction costs. While increasing capacity is a motive, the primary mover behind this project is resiliency.

7. Deep sea cables must be ultra-light because the greater the weight of a cable, the more likely it will break when a ship retrieves for repair.

8. Project operating life span is 25 years.

9. A challenge is that quality cable manufacturing is more difficult as the cable length grows.

10. Waterworth will be a 400 Tbps cable. There will be 24 fibre pairs.

11. Waterworth may land in Fortaleza. Some of the engineer comments suggested the design is not final.

Map Of The Fibre Optic Subsea Cable Waterworth


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