Meta's New Petal Cable Will Move 1 Petabit Per Second Under the Ocean

Meta is laying down a 7,000-kilometer fiber optic cable called Petal to connect the United States and France by 2029. This is the first transoceanic link capable of hitting a massive 1 petabit per second, which is effectively the bandwidth equivalent of streaming 6.25 billion audio tracks at the same time without breaking a sweat.

The secret sauce here is multi-core fiber technology. Instead of just stuffing more glass into a tube, engineers developed fiber with two independent cores within the same 125-micron diameter glass shell. By using 24 pairs of these fibers, the system creates 48 independent spatial channels, doubling the capacity of previous systems like Meta's Anjana cable without making the cable itself look like a bloated sea serpent.

To keep the data flowing across the Atlantic, the team had to overhaul their underwater repeaters. These devices now act like traffic controllers, splitting signals from the two-core fiber, boosting them, and stitching them back together. With about 100 of these repeaters spaced along the route, Sumitomo Electric provides the specialized 2C Z-PLUS Fiber ULL while NEC handles the actual heavy lifting of dropping the cable onto the seabed.

It is truly heartwarming to see a social media empire spending billions to ensure that low-latency advertisements for overpriced coffee reach the other side of the planet faster than ever. Surely, humanity’s greatest potential will be unlocked when the transmission of meaningless content finally hits the petabit threshold.

Source: Meta Engineering