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At first I thought "Facebook doesn't lay cable do they?" but to my surprise:

>Facebook subsidiary Edge Cable Holdings

How common is it when you want to build out a cable like this, you have a subsidiary of your own do it?

I would think you could just contract that out...

If they'd contracted it out they wouldn't be in this mess. A cable laying company leaving drilling fluid out doesn't make headlines unless it's named Facebook.

Also I presume most cable companies know the rules / try to follow them and etc. Maybe, maybe not, but at least you'd be somewhat insulted from that.

...and exactly how many facebook scale projects do you run?

probably cheaper for them to use the cable company they bought likely to support crazy projects like this.

Is Facebook running cables at unusually large scale?

If by "unusually large scale" you mean for FAANG-scale companies, no. It's probably pretty much in line with other global-scale companies. Which is to say: At one point, Google owned 30% of all long-haul fiber runs in the world. I doubt they're at that number anymore, but it's not because they've sold them off. I would not be surprised if Facebook owned only a tiny fraction of that, but even if they own 1% of the world's fiber runs, it's worth them having their own specialized subsidiary.

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