The cable will link France and the United States over about 7,000 kilometres and carry 1 petabit per second, per Meta double the most advanced cables at that distance. The trick is fibre with two cores instead of one. Service is expected in 2029.
- Petal doubles the capacity per fibre by putting two light cores into a strand as thin as a hair.
- NEC is the main system supplier and Sumitomo Electric makes the fibre; Orange supports the French landing.
- Per Meta, about 99% of intercontinental traffic runs on subsea cables; Petal is planned to enter service in 2029.
Nearly every video call to America runs through glass strands on the ocean floor. Nobody thinks about them until one breaks.
Meta announced its next such strand, and it is a different class. The company is not adding fibres to the cable. It is putting two cores into one fibre, at the same 125-micron thickness, the width of a hair.
Why two cores
Because, per Meta, one petabit cable uses far fewer materials and resources than two half-petabit systems. If you double the capacity in the same strand without raising the power, you avoid both a new cable and a requalification of all the equipment along the route.
This is the craft that rarely makes the news: not bigger, but denser. Sumitomo's engineers have made the two cores almost unable to hear each other. NEC makes the repeaters - a route like this typically needs about a hundred - that split the light from the two cores, amplify it and put it back together.
Meta says it wants multi-core fibre to become a normal choice for the whole industry. That will be testable when another company's next cable takes the same road.
Until then Petal is a plan with a date. If it arrives on time, in three years there will be a cable between Europe and America with double the capacity of today's most advanced ones.