Facebook (Meta) international cable expansion: animated map

I don't see any citation here for the 13% figure or how they arrived at this. It superficially seems like they considered any cable which FB/Meta were part owner of to be owned by them?

That FB/Meta is buying into cable systems does not surprise me, considering how the submarine cable industry is structured and the massive scale of FB/Meta. Cables have massive massive capex to build and relatively tiny opex. The cost structure is completely front-loaded and if you want to be paying the lowest cost prices and you have a large enough requirement, the best way to do this is to be part-owner on cable systems (or an IRU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indefeasible_rights_of_use).

Edit a bit because I see this line here: partial ownership over 13% of the world's total length of backhaul infrastructure

Basically they are adding up the length of all the cables where FB/Meta have any ownership interest (or perhaps just IRUs) and dividing by the total number of submarine cable length. This is wrong for a number of reasons. These cables are shared in a number of ways. Firstly, each cable contains multiple fiber pairs, in some of these FB/Meta is using only 1 of 6 pairs. Secondly, each fiber is further subdivided by extremely precise DWDM technology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength-division_multiplexi...) which allows multiple signals to travel along the same fiber. Finally (and less commonly) fibers are divided into segments. This is more common in SE Asia and Africa where a single cable is really a system which may land at 10++ locations, each segment can be a unique route, or sometimes some fibers in the system bypass some locations, sometimes some fiber pairs completely bypass some landing points. Sometimes just some optical channels within a single fiber are diverted to a landing point! The total system design is incredibly complicated and reducing it to this 13% figure is poor. It is completely plausible that on some of these systems that FB/Meta are using <1% of the design capacity.

There's a war out there, old friend, a world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information: ...what we see and hear, how we work, what we think. It's all about the information.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk0Mzci2Sks

I'm no fan of Facebook but this seems like a case of "damned if you do, damned if you don't" and/or looking for something to complain about. If they didn't fund/build their own cables, these same people would be griping that they're using more than their fair share of available bandwidth. Facebook has a bunch of bits that need to be sent, so they're paying for the infrastructure to send them. What's the problem?

I feel this seems reasonable in an economically liberal context, but I would hope there's enough regulatory apparatus to ensure they can't do shenanigans as a result of their holdings.

Also, I feel these kinds of things would ideally be managed by the state - in the same way that highways are? I mean, data is 'the commons' as a public sidewalk. I loathe to think some of our governing bodies are not up to the task, but, by gosh, they should be.

I heard a meme of how "Meta" is short for "Metastasize" - seems like each new FB story makes it more and more of a reality.

And Google will own... more than that. Google will have 19+ owned/part-owned cables, Meta has 14.

Perhaps Meta will one day pivot to global telecommunications provider.

If they go vertical like Amazon they will soon be building the ships that put the cables down…

Yet every cable listed is co-owned with telecom firms or other tech giants. So why is Meta being singled out on this?

The article seems to be counting percentage in terms of total kilometers of cables owned. Wouldn't total bandwidth/capacity be a better measure?

Am I the only one who sees a strange distribution of cables around the globe? A bunch in California, 1 in South America connecting maybe Buenos Aires and Rio, and zero in Oceania.

Also interesting to note the Bering Strait is not used, despite it being the only land almost connecting the West and the Far East.

If I'm reading this right they aren't really buying the cables, they're just buying reserved capacity on existing cables. This makes sense. Amazon, Google, and others do the same. It's a good way to make sure your data gets across the ocean even when everyone else is trying to do the same thing.

The question is who are they going to sell that to when they go under if they continue burning money in their metacrap.

Is there any kind of natural monopoly here? Who cares?

Horrible news. The government should run these networks, just like payments platforms.

I like how the title keeps reminding us, that Meta is Facebook. We need to keep this in mind and remind ourselves of that, so that they cannot wean themselves from their previous scandals.