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Meta’s Petal Subsea Cable to Bring Petabit-Class Optics to the Atlantic

Source Decision Insights Record Published September 28, 2026 Companies 2
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2 companies named across 2 categories, one of 4 articles referencing NEC. Previous coverage: Dell’Oro Group says AI RAN planning dominates MWC 2026 while GenAI traffic remains at 0.06% (Apr 2026).

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Meta announced Petal, a planned transatlantic subsea cable between the United States and France, with a target aggregate design capacity of 1 petabit per second over an approximately 7,000-km route. The company said the system would be built to support service entry in 2029.

Petal is positioned as a step toward higher-capacity subsea transport across the Atlantic. Meta said the design would deliver about twice the capacity it attributed to the current top transoceanic systems, describing the effort as a project for future deployment rather than operational capacity.

Meta stated that Petal’s capacity approach centers on space-division multiplexing implemented as two independently usable cores inside each optical fiber. The company said the multi-core fiber deployment would double capacity without a proportional increase in power or physical infrastructure, and that the design uses two-core, multi-core fiber. Meta also described Petal’s target capacity in aggregate terms: 1 Pbps equals 1,000 Tbps.

Meta said the cable would be built with subsea-system supplier NEC and fiber supplier Sumitomo Electric Industries, and that Orange would support the French landing on the Atlantic coast. Meta said it expects Petal to enter service in 2029. “1 Pbps” was described as aggregate system capacity, not a single end-to-end flow, and Meta said it had not publicly specified detailed terminal-line-system parameters. The company said it has invested in more than 20 subsea cable projects, including Project Waterworth, as part of its broader effort.

Press release, originally published by Alan Weissberger at techblog.comsoc.org.

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