Meta Unveils 4,300-Mile Petal Cable With 1-Petabit Capacity by 2029
Updated
Updated · Livescience.com · Oct 17
Meta Unveils 4,300-Mile Petal Cable With 1-Petabit Capacity by 2029
3 articles · Updated · Livescience.com · Oct 17
Summary
1 million Gbps is the target speed for Meta's new Petal subsea cable, a 4,300-mile link between the U.S. and France due to enter service in 2029.
That would make Petal the first transoceanic cable to reach 1 petabit per second—about double existing cables of similar length and more than five times Meta's 192-Tbps Marea system.
24 pairs of dual-core fibers and fan-in/fan-out signal routing are central to the design, letting 96 total cores carry the equivalent of 48 conventional fiber pairs without a proportional rise in power.
NEC will design and build the system, Sumitomo Electric will supply the fiber, and Meta said a cable of this length typically needs about 100 repeaters to keep optical signals strong.
Subsea cables carry about 99% of global internet traffic, making Petal part of Meta's broader push to expand backbone infrastructure after Marea in 2018, Amitie in 2023 and Anjana in 2025.