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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Telefonica on the Impact of 5G so far

Enrique Blanco, Global CTIO, Telefónica presented a Keynote at Telecoms Europe 5G 2021 virtual event on 9 Nov 2021. The title of his presentation was What’s the impact of 5G so far? and it discussed how the unprecedented speed is just the start of how 5G is changing the face of connectivity. What has been the impact so far on how people live, work, and play, all over the world? 

Telefonica sees 5G and Edge as enablers for new services requiring low latency and locality - https://t.co/ltauFpxABE #Free5Gtraining #3G4G5G #OperatorWatch #Telefónica #Telefonica #4G #5G #MEC #PrivateNetworks #5GStandalone #5GSA #Fiber #WiFi6 #OpenRAN #Automation #AIML pic.twitter.com/JDxew8RY1v

— Free 5G Training (@5Gtraining) October 13, 2021

The video of his talk is embedded below.

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NTT Technical Review Highlights ITU-T Work on Standards for Higher-Capacity Fiber

International Telecommunication Union - Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) Study Group 15 is working on revising standards (Recommendations) for single-mode optical fiber (SMF). There are also discussions toward standardizing space division multiplexing technologies, which are promising for overcoming the capacity limit of SMF. All these are captured in an NTT Technical Review article titled, "Recent Standardization Activities in ITU-T on Single-mode Optical Fiber and Space Division Multiplexing Technologies"

Here is an extract from the article:

The Recommendations shown in red in Table 1 are those being actively discussed. The G.652 fiber is used worldwide and recognized as “standard SMF.” The G.657 fiber has optical characteristics compatible with those of G.652 fiber but has improved bending loss. These two fibers support transmission over the O–L band* (1260–1625 nm) and used for various applications such as access, metro, and core networks. Recommendation G.654 is for a fiber supporting C–L-band* transmission and mainly used for submarine long-haul transmission systems. The revision of these Recommendations are active topics in ITU-T due to the capacity growth in terrestrial and submarine optical fiber networks. In the next section, recent activities for revising these SMF Recommendations are introduced.

...

Network capacity has been increasing at a rate of a few tens of percent, and the capacity crunch with SMF networks will become a serious issue in the 2020s. To overcome the capacity limit of SMF, fibers for space division multiplexing (SDM) transmission have been intensely investigated. Figure 4(a) shows the conceptual images of SDM fibers. SDM fibers can be basically categorized into two: multi-core fiber or multi-mode fiber. Multi-core fiber has multiple cores within a cladding, and multi-mode fiber has multiple propagation modes within a core. In SDM transmission, multiple signals can be simultaneously transmitted through multiple cores or modes, achieving much higher capacity compared with that in SMF. Before SDM fibers can be used in telecom networks worldwide, it is necessary to establish an SDM fiber Recommendation in the same manner as the SMF Recommendations. 

It was proposed and agreed at ITU-T 2020’s January meeting to start discussion on a new technical report for SDM optical fiber and cable. Although the content of this technical report is under discussion, it was agreed to include the related topics on cable, splice/connectors, and installing technologies. The main discussion pointes are: target application and benefits of SDM technology and categorization of SDM fiber. Regarding the target application for SDM technologies, it is important to compare technologies that use SMF to improve spatial density, such as high-fiber-count cable or reduced coating-diameter fiber technologies, as shown in Fig. 4(b). Although various SDM fibers have been proposed, current multi-core fiber- or few-mode fiber-based SDM fiber is being discussed as a potential candidate of SDM fiber. It is expected that the fiber parameters and test methods for such fibers will be discussed and incorporated into this technical report. The tentative publishing year for this technical report is 2022. The discussion on SDM fiber standardization has been initiated in advance in Japan, and the current technical level or challenges for SDM standardization has/have been summarized as technical report-1077 entitled “Technical Report on Space Division Multiplexing Technologies” (in Japanese) published by the Telecommunication Technology Committee (TTC).

You can read the article here and download the PDF after free registration from here.

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• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Facebook's Fiber Deploying Robot
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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.

IOWN - Innovative Optical and Wireless Network

If you are not watching the optical networking space, chances are you have not heard of this Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) initiative which was proposed by NTT and is now being standardised by IOWN Global Forum.

Intel, NTT & Sony launched the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) Global Forum for next-generation communication in 2019, bringing all of the elements of photonics network infrastructure under one roof. https://t.co/iE15g0UJr3

— Mihoko Matsubara (@M_Miho_JPN) March 30, 2020

NTT Technical Review published a detailed article on this topic earlier this year. The following is from the article:

To create an affluent and diverse society, NTT has proposed the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) concept, which is a new communication infrastructure that can provide high-speed broadband communication and enormous computing resources by using innovative technologies including optical technologies. NTT also believes that these innovative technologies can optimize society as a whole and individuals using all types of information. IOWN uses three elements, All-Photonics Network, Digital Twin Computing, and Cognitive Foundation® to create a smart world, as shown below (Fig. 3).

• Dramatic reduction in power consumption and broadening of communication bandwidth can provide enormous processing capacity for the explosive increase in computational complexity.
• By increasing the capacity and reducing the delay of communications, it is possible to share in real time huge amounts of information collected from various sensors, exceeding the five senses.
• Dedicated use of optical wavelengths provides a high level of confidentiality and stability and can be used for mission-critical services.
• Multi-orchestration capabilities for centralized management of various resources, enabling resource utilization across industrial and regional domains
• The creation of a cyberspace that replicates and expands the real world by combining various digital twins and human models

All-Photonics Network

As the number of people and things connected to a network increase, advanced, complex, and large-scale information processing such as for AI will require a vast amount of power consumption. To reduce such power consumption and meet mission critical service requirements, NTT applies photonics technologies to end-to-end environments for achieving ultra-low-power consumption, large-capacity, and low-delay networks. For example, NTT aims to increase power efficiency 100 fold by developing transmission devices that control optical wavelengths and photonics-electronics convergence devices. NTT also aims to expand transmission capacity 125 fold by increasing multiplexing in optical fibers and expanding multicores in a fiber (Fig. 4).

Digital Twin Computing

A digital twin is an image of real-world objects, such as production machines, aircraft engines, and automobiles in factories, by mapping their shapes, conditions, and functions into cyberspace and expressing them accurately. Using digital twins enables us to analyze the current situation, predict the future, and simulate objects in cyberspace.

Digital Twin Computing is a new computing paradigm that makes it possible to reproduce and simulate the interaction between things and people freely in cyberspace by conducting computations such as exchange, fusion, duplication, and synthesis for many digital twins representing the real world.

Cognitive Foundation®

To achieve low-power-consumption, high-capacity, high-quality communication networks and large-scale interactions between people and objects, it is necessary to select and use various resources appropriately. The Cognitive Foundation is an infrastructure that provides a set of functions necessary to build and operate services by using various methods of collecting, processing, storing, and communicating data scattered throughout various locations.

NTT recently released Technology Report for Smart World 2020 - https://t.co/EPlPBGPoWs - 11 Technologies to Update the Smart World: AI, XR, HMI, Cybersecurity, Phygital, Networks, Energy, Quantum, Biotech, Advanced Materials, Additive Manufacturing#Free5Gtraining #6G #B5G pic.twitter.com/Cu36CyoJhK

— 5G Training (@5Gtraining) May 31, 2020

NTT recently released Technology Report for Smart World 2020 which introduces 11 technologies that they think are crucial to thinking about the changing world ahead. According to them, these technologies are the focus of their own research and development efforts, and are also being vigorously pursued around the world. Some of these technologies are key components of IOWN, while others can be expected to see wide adoption as a result of IOWN according to the report.

Back in April, IOWN GF unveiled its Vision 2030 White Paper. With artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented realities, 5G, dynamic computing scaling, blockchain and other advanced technologies on the verge of becoming part of the daily lives for billions of people, IOWN GF’s Vision 2030 is to define and build a global communications infrastructure over the next decade capable of sustainably maximizing the benefits these new technologies offer society and businesses. The hope is to create a smarter world where technology is used more naturally and becomes more pervasive for all. Download the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network Global Forum Vision 2030 and Technical Directions White Paper here.



Finally, the videos will provide a much clearer idea about the vision of IOWN. As always, feel free to provide your insights in the comments below.