Meta to Build Petal Subsea Cable Connecting US and France, Planned Capacity Reaches 1 Pbps

en.Wedoany.com Reported - On September 21, Meta announced the construction of the transatlantic subsea cable Petal, a project that will connect the United States and France, with a total length of approximately 7,000 kilometers, a design capacity of 1 Pbps, or 1,000 Tbps, and a planned launch in 2029. Meta stated that Petal will become the first transoceanic subsea cable to achieve petabit-level capacity over a transoceanic distance, with a capacity approximately twice that of the most advanced transoceanic subsea cables at the same distance currently in service.

Petal adopts a 24-pair dual-core fiber design, with two transmission cores inside each fiber, forming a transmission capability equivalent to 48 pairs of conventional single-core fibers. The system will become the first project to deploy multi-core fiber technology at scale in a transoceanic subsea cable. Meta disclosed that the dual-core fiber used in Petal maintains an outer diameter of 125 micrometers, and controls transmission loss and inter-core crosstalk through ultra-pure synthetic quartz material and a counter-propagation design.

NEC serves as the general contractor for the Petal subsea cable system, responsible for the engineering design and verification of the dual-core fiber subsea cable, subsea repeaters, fan-in/fan-out interfaces, and power supply system, as well as the final system manufacturing and installation. Petal has a total length of approximately 7,000 kilometers and is expected to require approximately 100 subsea repeaters, each configured with 96 amplification channels, with conversion between the dual-core fiber and the single-core amplification system accomplished through fan-in/fan-out interfaces. The system power supply will remain within the range of existing subsea cable power supply equipment with a maximum of 18 kV.

Sumitomo Electric Industries supplies NEC with the dual-core fiber used in Petal, employing "2C Z-PLUS ULL Fiber" ultra-low-loss multi-core fiber technology. Under the project division of labor, Sumitomo Electric is responsible for the development and manufacturing of the dual-core fiber, and NEC integrates it into the complete subsea cable system.

The landing work on the French side is being jointly advanced by Meta and Orange. The two parties are planning the landing of Petal on the French Atlantic coast and will connect the subsea cable landing facility to the European terrestrial communications network. Orange serves as the French landing party in the project. The specific landing location, the construction scale of the landing station, and the terrestrial backhaul route have not yet been announced.

Petal is a next-generation capacity upgrade building on Meta's existing transatlantic subsea cables. Meta's previously invested Anjana subsea cable is configured with 24 fiber pairs and has a system capacity of approximately 0.5 Pbps; after Petal adopts 24 pairs of dual-core fiber, its design capacity is increased to 1 Pbps, representing an increase to approximately 5.5 times the capacity of the Marea transatlantic subsea cable that Meta participated in building in its early stages.