Facebook hires NEC to build a subsea fiber-optic cable between Europe and the US

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Why it matters: Facebook has long been looking for ways to increase the availability and quality of internet access around the world. Years ago, the social media giant even developed a massive, solar-powered plane that could beam high-speed internet to underserved areas. That project was killed off in 2018, but Facebook is pursuing a new idea now: a giant, undersea fiber-optic cable that will stretch between Europe and the US.

The goal of this initiative is to drastically improve data transfer speeds between the two regions. The cable will be composed of 24 fiber pairs, with the ability to transmit a "half Petabit per second." If the cable's construction is successful, that figure will represent the fastest data transfer speeds for any long-distance, "repeatered optical subsea cable system" of its kind.

Facebook won't be constructing this cable itself -- it lacks the expertise and infrastructure to do so. Instead, it has chosen to contract the work out to NEC (formerly known as the Nippon Electronic Company), a multinational Japanese corporation that specializes in this sort of technology. Indeed, the corporate behemoth claims it has built more than 300,000 km of fiber-optic cable to date, "spanning the earth nearly 8 times."

Facebook itself has said that the cable will provide "200X more internet capacity" than other transatlantic cables built throughout the 2000s, but of course, we'll need to wait and see whether or not that will prove accurate.

It is not clear how long the NEC's latest project will take to complete. We'll be reaching out to the corporation to see if its PR team is willing to give us an estimate, and we will update this article if we hear back.

At any rate, Facebook's goal here is admirable, though it certainly hasn't given the world any reason to believe its intentions are purely altruistic -- especially in light of the whistleblower controversy it has found itself embroiled in as of late.

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Very interesting. I'd love to hear what the material factors were in FB feeling it needed to construct / own this cable itself vs. leasing from others; and also why a bridge between NA and Europe was more important to it than say more data centers in Europe.
 
Break them up now! Being half of the world's social media/digital communication oligopoly with all of the data mining and social experimentation that goes along with it is bad enough, but their additional forays into hardware manufacturing, entertainment media streaming/subscription service, acquisitions of all kinds of ai development firms, burgeoning neural-computer interface technology, and now utilities infrastructure too? Break them up!
 
Everyone so angry at FB but nobody knowing the real reason for all that rage.

And the real reason is that FB doesn't censor anti-gay and similar comments. They don't have special protections for special people. They don't ban normal and protect abnormal. They allow people to say: "Since <someone> got into my street, the number of rapes went 1000% up."

Basically, all the rage against them is because they don't censor the truth. Like for example YouTube. Where you can spit on certain people, using their personal names, but not even mention some other personal names, if the context can in any way be interpreted as non-supportive by the censorship algorithms.

You have to support certain agenda, or your comments get deleted. FB didn't implement such agenda-specific filters, so let's attack them for supporting free speech. While most of other social networks, that implement agenda-censored "free speech" are okay.

I guess nowadays everyone supports the worst kind of internet censorship...
 
Everyone so angry at FB but nobody knowing the real reason for all that rage.

And the real reason is that FB doesn't censor anti-gay and similar comments. They don't have special protections for special people. They don't ban normal and protect abnormal. They allow people to say: "Since <someone> got into my street, the number of rapes went 1000% up."

Basically, all the rage against them is because they don't censor the truth. Like for example YouTube. Where you can spit on certain people, using their personal names, but not even mention some other personal names, if the context can in any way be interpreted as non-supportive by the censorship algorithms.

You have to support certain agenda, or your comments get deleted. FB didn't implement such agenda-specific filters, so let's attack them for supporting free speech. While most of other social networks, that implement agenda-censored "free speech" are okay.

I guess nowadays everyone supports the worst kind of internet censorship...

Facebook CEOs have been honest. They would love to censor all conservative speech. So far they've been pretty successful by labeling anything opposing them as 'hate speech'. As they say, truth sounds like hate to those who hate the truth.
 
Facebook CEOs have been honest. They would love to censor all conservative speech. So far they've been pretty successful by labeling anything opposing them as 'hate speech'. As they say, truth sounds like hate to those who hate the truth.

Wow. That's a great quote. "Truth sounds like hate to those who hate the truth". You've made my day.
 
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