NEC has revealed some more information about Facebook's plan to build a new fiber optic subsea cable in a bid to improve data transfer speeds between the US and Europe.
Facebook announced on Oct. 7 that it wants to "improve internet capacity across the world by sea, land, and air" through a variety of programs. The company said that some of those initiatives, such as a fiber-deploying robot called Bombyx and a new wireless technology called Terragraph, have already made high-speed internet available to 300 million people worldwide.
Now those initiatives will be complemented by a new system meant to improve a critical part of the internet. "Subsea cables connect continents and are the backbone of the global internet," Facebook says. "Our first-ever transatlantic subsea cable system will connect Europe to the US. This new cable provides 200X more internet capacity than the transatlantic cables of the 2000s."
Facebook didn't say much else about the system, though, which is where NEC's announcement comes in. The company says it's been contracted to build the cable using "newly developed 24 fiber pair cable and repeaters" to "deliver a maximum transmission capacity of a half Petabit per second, the highest to date for a long distance repeatered optical subsea cable system."
