Wiring the Planet: Scaling Meta's Global Optical Network
summary
Meta builds and operates an expanding global optical mesh: more than 150,000 route kilometers of subsea cable and dozens of projects with 3,600+ route kilometers of terrestrial fiber tying 21 data centers, 200 colos and 5,000 caches. Highlights include 2Africa: 47,000 km, 42 landings across 33 countries reaching ~3 billion people and Echo & Bifrost: first direct US–Singapore links, boosting trans‑Pacific capacity ~70%. Innovations: SDM spatial‑division multiplexing, aluminum conductors, Atlantis routing/modeling tool, mid‑ocean power‑buoy trials. Control stack uses a topology model, continuous discovery probes, an optical pipeline that nearly fully automates channel turn‑up and bottoms‑up fault detection.
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chapters (18)
- 0:00Meta’s global fiber network
- 1:54Traffic growth challenges
- 3:21Subsea cable deployment timelines
- 5:07New technologies in networking
- 6:53Africa submarine cable system
- 7:13Echo and Bifrost cables
- 8:17SDM and subsea innovations
- 10:23Connecting subsea to terrestrial networks
- 11:28Meta’s global fiber needs
- 12:11Meta’s backbone traffic growth
- 13:35IP versus optical scaling
- 15:18Network growth design
- 16:22Topology modeling in practice
- 17:45Real-time topology discovery
- 18:47Automating capacity turn-up
- 19:30Detecting optical faults
- 21:38Global network operations scheduling
- 23:05Key takeaways
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