Update on META's Waterworth Project

META has started selecting landing sites. As the map below shows, the subsea cable's routing is unique, a record breaking 50,000 kilometers in length, and it will form a ring around the world. A ring allows Facebook to reroute traffic in the opposite direction if there is a fault. Waterworth is a 24 fibre pair system. That puts at the top of the fiber pair count for spatial division multiplexing systems. So figure a design transmission rate of a half petabit per second. 

Although crazy news outlets have reported it will cost $10 billion, that figure is absurd. The project can easily be done for $2 billion or less even with extensive terrestrial trenching to create new and unique fibre routes. Will the project use new technologies like multicore fibre or multiband spectrum? Doubtful. The price tag dictates the META subsea cable design team will use standard proven technology. No one wants to tell their boss they just wasted $1.5 billion dollars. It is not good for your career. 😃

Waterworth will likely land in each country at two well separated locations to avoid single points of failure. Terrestrial fibre will link those two cable landing stations or landing points. Indeed, Facebook has announced Waterworth is landing at Mumbai and also on India's East Coast at Visakhapatnam, which is 700 kilometers by car North of Chennai. The city of Chennai has been the main landing point on India's East Coast. 

This project is really all about the Red Sea. Regardless of the tentative peace agreement's outcome, the Red Sea has too many outages and too many cables using it to remain the go to choice. The conservative SMW6 consortium is constructing a Red Sea bypass route via the Saudi Arabian desert to reach Egypt. So the trend to diversify away from the Red Sea and probably Egypt as well is quite clear. I just completed a major deal with a US financial helping design their global network. The sole outstanding item is whether to go around the Red Sea via South Africa to reach the UK or across the Saudia Arabian desert on AMEER. I believe long term the solution is SWM6.

An emerging Indian superstar in the subsea cable world is Sify, an Indian ISP with significant fibre optic infrastructure. It is hosting Google's Blue Raman cable in Mumbai using its own cable landing station. It is also hosting META in Mumbai and at Visakhapatnam. These deals are usually structured as cash plus bandwidth capacity transactions. This aligns Sify's incentives with Google and META.

Map of Facebook's fibre optic Waterworth Subsea Cable


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