The cable will help deliver better 4G, 5G and broadband internet to Asia, according to Facebook
Facebook and Google are building undersea internet cables around the world — and are betting that the investments will bring in millions of new customers.
Facebook revealed Sunday that it is helping build a 7,500-mile cable connecting countries including Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines and Taiwan. The cable, called Project Apricot, is expected to launch in 2024 and will help deliver better 4G, 5G and broadband internet to the region, according to Facebook.
The project will deliver much-needed internet capacity, redundancy, and reliability to expand connections in the Asia-Pacific region, said Facebook engineering manager Nico Roehrich.
The Apricot cable is part of our ongoing effort to expand global network infrastructure and better serve the more than 3.5 billion people around the world who use our services every month, Roehrich added.
That project adds to another undersea cable connecting Singapore, Indonesia and North America that Facebook and Google first unveiled together this March in collaboration with several Asian telecom companies.
The tech giants have not disclosed the amount of money they are spending on such projects but the cables have the potential to bring internet access to millions of new customers.
Facebook also said Monday it is expanding an already announced 23,000-mile undersea cable project circling the entire continent of Africa and connecting to Europe.
The cable, called 2Africa, was designed to link 26 countries including Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Bloomberg reported Monday that Facebook has added Angola, Seychelles and Comoros to the project.
Facebook is working on the project alongside Chinese state-owned telecom company China Mobile and South Africa’s MTN Group.
The expansion of the 2Africa project is part of Facebook’s broader goal of bringing Africans online. Just 40 percent of people in the continent of 1.2 billion people have internet access, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.