FacebookElizabeth Rivera Hartling, Pascal Pecci, Matthew Mitchell6 min readintermediate
Inside Petal: Building the World’s First Petabit-Class Transoceanic Subsea Cable
Summary
Meta announced Petal, the first petabit-class transoceanic subsea cable, connecting France and the US over 7,000 km. It's the first to deploy multi-core fiber technology at scale, doubling capacity per fiber without a proportional increase in power or physical infrastructure.
- Petal will be the first subsea cable to deliver 1 Pbps capacity at transoceanic distances (7,000 km).
- It's the first to deploy 2-core fiber technology at scale, effectively doubling fiber count without increasing physical cable size.
- Repeaters use a Fan-In/Fan-Out (FIFO) interface to transition 2-core fiber to single-core for amplification and back.
- This design allows doubling capacity while remaining within existing 18 kV power feeding equipment limits.
This innovation is critical for engineers working on global network infrastructure, as it sets a new standard for subsea cable capacity and efficiency, addressing the exponential growth in data demand.
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