Facebook building subsea cable that will encompass the world

FYI, this is NOT the cable Facebook is planning to build, this is the dream cable of a submarine cable… enthusiast? From LinkedIn: “To be clear, this is not Meta&#x27;s plan or map. This is Ver &quot;T&quot; and T stands for Tagare. It&#x27;s what I think is going to happen to this cable if I was designing it. This is my wish list.”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;pulse&#x2F;map-metas-w-cable-sunil-tagare-blanc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;pulse&#x2F;map-metas-w-cable-sunil-tagar...</a>

Highly recommend an article by The Verge on how these things are repaired and maintained.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;24070570&#x2F;internet-cables-undersea-deep-repair-ships" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;c&#x2F;24070570&#x2F;internet-cables-undersea...</a>

So do we sometimes lay cables on top of other cables down there?<p>What governments do you have to go to to get approval to do this? Could I just run a string across the Atlantic Ocean?<p>If we do lay cables on top of other cables how high do they get stacked? Are there challenges to bring the lower cables back up? Does that happen? Or do we just keep them down there forever basically and upgrade the hardware at the terminal?

There&#x27;s an even more recent post<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;subseacables.blogspot.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;10&#x2F;facebooks-semi-secret-w-cable.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;subseacables.blogspot.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;10&#x2F;facebooks-semi-sec...</a>

What other private companies have such cables? Google?<p>How do they maintain them?<p>At what point to these become considered &quot;national security&quot; assets (in the eyes of the owning company&#x27;s nation)?<p>Do they rent them out as business as well?<p>(This blog looks like it could have many such answers, but looking for a HN-comment-sized answer.)

Hi,<p>I am the author. The article is not speculation. I know from sources inside Facebook that the cable will head Southeast from the US East Coast directly to South Africa. From there it heads directly to India. From India to Australia. From Australia to the US West.<p>What is speculation are the branching units. It is natural to add branching units to aggregate traffic to more countries. But I have no confirmation.<p>Regards,<p>Roderick.

Facebook already stole the “Metaverse” branding from Neal Stephenson and now they are trying to set up a data haven. They should put their hub in a southeast Asia island and name it The Sultanate of Kinakuta.

I can&#x27;t even imagine the price of the cable that will go from Australia to the east coast, that must be astronomical

Interesting that they say this cable is “potentially for AI” - I really wonder to what end? The ‘Ask Meta AI’ thing they’ve put in Facebook and Instagram seems pretty useless, the comment summaries are potentially kind-of useful but surely actually reduces the engagement (if it makes people less likely to read the comments and therefore less likely to comment themselves, or like or reply to comments).<p>So that mostly leaves “AI generated nonsense content” for Facebook and Instagram which surely people are going to get sick of fast…?<p>Just really not actually seeing where they actually get a useful product out of AI here…

Will this improve my ping in Counter Strike if I am playing with friends on the East Coast and I live in South East Asia?

How much does a cable like that cost?<p>I feel like governments should be funding healthcare, housing and connectivity instead of missiles thousands of miles away from their borders.

That&#x27;s a ton of money from a free website.

I hope we will never live in a world, where something so important is entrusted to such an untrustworthy company. Things like undersea cables are infrastructure and I would not want that controlled by some for profit company with abysmal reputation like Facebook.

If they don&#x27;t call it Project Jörmungandr then they&#x27;re fools.

This will turbo-charge ad delivery. Just what the world needs.