FACEBOOK TO BUILD A CABLE WITH THE SIZE OF THE EARTH’S CIRCUMFERENCE
Well, nearly.
When Facebook does something, it’s rarely tiny or minuscule. The company goes big and makes people astonish. This time, Facebook has announced that it plans to build a 37,000-kilometer (23,000 mile) undersea cable to ensure that the internet connectivity of Africa improves.
The cable will be laid around Africa, and it will be “nearly equal to the circumference of the Earth” as per a blog by Facebook. It will interconnect 23 nations across the Middle East, Africa and Europe.
It is also a good market expansion move by Facebook as Africa has about 1.3 billion residents, and still, it is among the least connected. Highlighting the commitment to those people, Facebook said, “We are committed to bringing more people online to a faster internet — and with 3.5 billion people globally unconnected, there is still a lot to do.”
This new Facebook project is dubbed as 2Africa and to make it successful, the social media giant is partnering with MTN (South Africa), Orange (France), Vodafone (Britain) and China Mobile. The cable will be constructed by Alcatel Submarine Networks, an entity of Nokia. The cable will be buried three meters deeper than average to ensure that it’s not easily damaged.
The cable laid by Facebook might offer three times the local network capacity. Facebook also said that the current coronavirus pandemic makes the investment of USD 1 (about AUD 1.55) billion timely. Facebook stated “2Africa is being completed as part of our efforts toward an open and inclusive internet ecosystem, which is a vital part of the continent’s digital economic growth. The first subsea cable system to seamlessly connect East and West Africa across a single open system, 2Africa will enable new avenues of communication from coast to coast.”
Sub-sea cables have become an essential part of the world we live in. They carry a majority of inter-continental data of the world. It is also a low cost and faster transmission method. The cable Facebook is creating will run along the bottom of the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea.
The fibre-optic cables from Facebook will use Spatial Division Multiplexing technology (SDMI) and will have double the capacity of older ones.
