Meta's Project Waterworth: The Next Evolution in Subsea Connectivity

Meta has unveiled its most ambitious subsea cable project to date — Project Waterworth, previously referred to as "W", because of it's shape. The multi-billion-dollar initiative is set to become the longest subsea cable in the world, spanning over 50,000 km and connecting five major continents, including the U.S., India, Brazil, and South Africa. With 24 fibre pairs delivering the highest capacity technology available, Project Waterworth will redefine global digital infrastructure and enhance connectivity for billions of users.

Subsea cables form the backbone of the internet, carrying more than 95% of intercontinental traffic and enabling global communication, financial transactions, and AI-driven innovations. With this latest venture, Meta aims to open three new oceanic corridors, ensuring high-speed, reliable connectivity that will power the next wave of AI advancements worldwide. By leveraging cutting-edge routing techniques, enhanced burial methods in high-risk areas, and deep-sea deployments up to 7,000 metres, Project Waterworth is designed for maximum resilience and security.

India at the Centre of Meta’s Connectivity Vision

India is central to Meta’s strategy, with its platforms—Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—serving over a billion users in the country. With AI adoption accelerating, demand for data centre capacity and seamless connectivity is at an all-time high. Project Waterworth is expected to play a pivotal role in supporting India’s digital economy by providing the necessary infrastructure to handle AI workloads, cloud services, and high-speed internet demands.

The project also underscores Meta’s shift in subsea cable strategy. Unlike its earlier 2Africa initiative, which followed a consortium approach, Project Waterworth appears to be a fully owned and controlled system. This mirrors Google's model of securing dedicated infrastructure for strategic markets rather than relying on shared capacity. While this approach ensures end-to-end control and security, it diverges from the collaborative model that has been highly successful in previous large-scale subsea cable projects.

Bypassing Global Chokepoints

One of the key aspects of Project Waterworth is its avoidance of politically sensitive and high-risk regions. Meta has reportedly designed the cable to steer clear of the Red Sea, the South China Sea, Egypt, and the Malacca Strait—areas that have become significant geopolitical bottlenecks for global internet traffic. By taking a direct route between the U.S. and India with strategic stops in South Africa and potentially Australia, Project Waterworth aims to ensure long-term security and avoid the risks associated with conflict zones and regulatory challenges in transit countries.

However, this bypassing of traditional routes does come with a trade-off: increased latency. Despite this, Meta appears to prioritise long-term security and reliability over marginal improvements in data transmission speeds. The project will also likely face regulatory hurdles, particularly in India, where obtaining permits for marine surveys and installations is notoriously complex and time-consuming.

The Battle for AI Connectivity Dominance

Meta’s decision to fully own Project Waterworth could have wider implications for the subsea cable industry. If Meta excludes partners, it may push competitors like Google to develop their own dedicated infrastructure to serve India’s growing digital ecosystem. Given the scale of investment—potentially exceeding $10 billion over the next decade—this move signals a new era of tech giants building independent, AI-optimised connectivity solutions.

While Project Waterworth marks a significant leap forward in global connectivity, the challenge will be balancing rapid deployment with regulatory constraints. If successful, it will not only strengthen Meta’s position as a digital infrastructure leader but also cement India’s role as a global AI powerhouse in the decades to come.

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• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: The Role of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) in Making Sure Internet Works
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Data Centers At Meta: Heterogeneous Integration Driven By AI/ML And Network Applications

Last year, tech giants including Intel, Meta, Arm, Google Cloud, AMD, Qualcomm, TSMC and ASE formed the Chiplet consortium. A news article in Fierce Electronics said:

Several giant tech companies have joined hands to promote an open standard for chip components called chiplets and how they are crammed together in system-on-chip (SoC) designs deemed critical to a variety of future handheld and high-performance computers that power AI applications and much more.

The open standard, called Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe), has been developed by Intel and clearly benefits Intel’s integrated device manufacturer (IDM) strategy as it builds new chip fabs in Arizona and Ohio and elsewhere outside the U.S.  Intel has been a prominent voice in the push to expand chip manufacturing outside of Taiwan and the rest of Asia where it is heavily focused today.

Intel has donated its UCIe standard to founding members in a new consortium that includes Intel along with Advanced Semiconductor Engineering, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., AMD, Arm, Google Cloud, Meta, Microsoft, Samsung and Qualcomm. The founders have already ratified UCIe 1.0 which covers the die-to-die physical layer, die-to-die protocols and software stacks which leverage the existing PCI Express (PCIe) and Compute Express Link (CXL) industry standards.

Ravi Agarwal, a technical sourcing manager at the Facebook/Meta Infrastructure group is responsible for driving advanced packaging architectures and foundry for both networking and AI/ML compute applications to meet Facebook’s future workloads. He is driving Chiplet Business Workstream in Open Domain-Specific Architecture (ODSA) Sub-Project within the Open Compute Project (OCP), working with ecosystem partners to enable a Chiplet marketplace. 

In a talk delivered for the IEEE Electronics Packaging Society (EPS) SFBA, he focused on heterogeneous integration for Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and network applications at Meta Infrastructure, and discussed implications for packaging and system-level considerations. In the talk he also shared some of the advanced packaging (chiplet) initiatives in which Meta is participating to develop an open ecosystem.

The talk is embedded below:

While the slides of this talk is not available, you can see slides of another talk he delivered here.

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The Role of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) in Making Sure Internet Works

Ever wondered how Internet works? Surely you did but did you actually figure out? Most often, people just understand it roughly how it works but sometimes details could be handy.

Plum consulting recently published a detailed study titled, "How the Internet works (and is paid for)".  It is quite a detailed study and is divided into three parts:

• The first part explores how data and content move around the Internet, and how it is coordinated and governed;
• The second part focuses on the economics of the Internet and how the delivery of content is paid for;
• The third part provides cases studies of the economics of the Internet in five APAC countries: South Korea, Australia, Indonesia, Japan, and Singapore.

There is also a concise summary if that helps. 

A recent article on Ookla titled "5 Critical Services that Keep the Internet Up and Running" described how the internet works and what causes an Outage. The article explains the role of Content delivery networks (CDNs), Domain Name System (DNS), Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), Services and their Application Programming Interfaces (API) and finally Downdetector.

BGP is an important service which has been in the news regularly after some major outage. Last year when Facebook disappeared from the Internet, BGP was responsible. Facebook (Meta) Engineering published a detailed post explaining it here. Cloudflare also looked at this Facebook BGP issue here and have a simple explanation about what BGP is:

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the postal service of the Internet. When someone drops a letter into a mailbox, the Postal Service processes that piece of mail and chooses a fast, efficient route to deliver that letter to its recipient. Similarly, when someone submits data via the Internet, BGP is responsible for looking at all of the available paths that data could travel and picking the best route, which usually means hopping between autonomous systems.

BGP is the protocol that makes the Internet work by enabling data routing. When a user in Singapore loads a website with origin servers in Argentina, BGP is the protocol that enables that communication to happen quickly and efficiently.

This video below is also a good simple explanation

BGP can be a serious issue when Internet is hijacked, hence even the regulators are looking at it to ensure there is no country wide Internet failure. An example from Swedish Post and Telecommunications Board (PTS) here.

The Swedish Post and Telecommunications Board (PTS) @PTSse has reviewed how the five companies work to manage known vulnerabilities in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) function, which is necessary for external traffic exchange on the Internet. https://t.co/1vogdTChmC

— Rudolf van der Berg (@internetthought) October 13, 2022

Similarly, UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has published a Technical report on "Responsible use of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for ISP interworking", which explains best practices for the use of this fundamental data routing protocol.

Telco sec is a huge space, so friends like Stuart Lyle are important. He pointed out that NCSC UK has published guidance on BGP and that it is referenced in the UK telco act:https://t.co/ysj7s88U4Z so that is for all of you, in case you also missed it

— Silke Holtmanns (@SHoltmanns) March 31, 2022

With all these ongoing conflicts and politics in the play, it is important for the Service Providers and Mobile Operators to ensure there is no failure because of lack of understanding of the fundamentals.

On the Large BGP Leak that hit European Mobile Carriers and rerouted data to China & Russia. We’ve seen this before says @Wired https://t.co/E0pO7F1XoD https://t.co/V39RciBGwV #decipher #deciphersec via @DrPippaM pic.twitter.com/bRnyroSI3W

— Telecomunicaciones e innovación tecnológica (@lastelecos) June 12, 2019

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Facebook's Fiber Deploying Robot

Facebook Connectivity, in collaboration with a number of partners, has spent the last few years developing an aerial fiber deployment solution that uses a robot designed to safely deploy a specialized fiber-optic cable on medium-voltage (MV) power lines. An article on Facebook Engineering page provides more details:

Each robot will be capable of installing over a kilometer of fiber and passing the dozens of intervening obstacles autonomously in approximately an hour and a half. To account for the human interaction steps such as setup, loading and unloading the robot, installing transitions, etc., we have been conservatively estimating an overall build speed of 1.5 km to 2 km per robot per day on average.

While traditional aerial fiber deployment involves heavy machinery, reel carts, large spools and large crew sizes, a fiber deployment crew deploying our solution, will comprise two or three electric utility linemen and a pickup truck with a few kilometer spools of fiber, a robot, and a few accessories, allowing many crews to work in parallel. These accessories will include an apparatus, developed by our partners Quanta Services, that’s designed to allow the robot to be safely loaded and unloaded from the live line by the line staff. There is also a custom cable clamp, which can be used to periodically clamp the fiber to the power line using a hot stick, along with a specially designed splice case and phase to ground assembly. We expect the total cost, including labor, depreciation, and materials, to be between $2 and $3 USD per meter in developing countries.

By lowering the total cost of aerial fiber deployment, we expect that our system will have a significant impact on internet penetration, especially among the half of the world earning less than $5.50 USD per day. This is thanks to a subtle benefit of the enormous bandwidth of each fiber strand, which allows large capacity upgrades to be made via simple changes to the electronics on either end of the fiber. Illustrated in the chart below, with each small increase in cost, we get a large increase in capacity, resulting in the cost per bit falling over time. We believe this feature of fiber will help enable those even in lowest income brackets to be able to afford all the rich content the internet has to offer, helping to bridge the digital divide.

Here is a video from them:



The post on the website is far more detailed and is available here.

Interestingly AFL has a similar type of robot they have been using for a while to do similar kinds of deployments. Details available here and a video, back from 2013, below:



These innovations should definitely help connect more unconnected people in every part of the world soon.