Facebook and Instagram owner Meta Platforms Inc on Sunday announced that it is collaborating with major telecoms in the Asia-Pacific region to build a new submarine cable to bring increased connectivity to Taiwan and five other nations in 2028.
Candle, an 8,000km-long submarine cable, would be the largest-capacity cable in the Asia-Pacific region, connecting more than 580 million people in Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore with 570 terabits per second (Tbps) of capacity, the California-based social media company said.
The cable would use new 24 fiber-pair cable technology, capable of delivering bandwidths comparable with Anjana, the company’s largest-capacity cable, which connects Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to Santander, Spain.
19.Photo: AFP
“The Asia-Pacific region is home to over 58 percent of the world’s Internet users, many of whom rely on robust global infrastructure for online connectivity and access to innovative tech such as AI [artificial intelligence],” the company said in a statement.
“As such, we continue to build world-class network infrastructure with enough capacity and resilience to enable rich online experiences for people all over the world,” it added.
Candle is part of Meta’s Project Waterworth, aiming to build undersea cables connecting five continents by the end of the decade, it said.
In addition to Candle, Meta has also constructed three other cables in the Asia-Pacific region: Apricot, Bifrost and Echo.
Apricot runs between Taiwan, Japan and Guam, with planned extensions to the Philippines, Indonesia and Singapore, enabling the 12,000km system to complement the Bifrost and Echo systems with 290Tbps of capacity, the company said.
In 2021, Meta and its partners said they were committed to increasing transpacific capacity by 70 percent through Bifrost and Echo.
Bifrost, which connects Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and the US, is expected to extend to Mexico next year, the statement said.
“Bifrost will chart a different path from prior transpacific cables by adding 260Tbps of redundancy to this popular digital route,” the company said.
Echo also provides 260Tbps of capacity between Guam and California, with options for further connectivity into Asia, Meta said.
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