Facebook and Google are wanting to lay two immense subsea cables that will link the U.S. West Coast to Singapore and Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s biggest economy and home to a developing number of cell phone clients.
The Echo and Bifrost trans-Pacific cables will expand the information capacity between the regions by 70% and improve internet dependability, Facebook said Monday.
While Facebook is investing into the two cables, Google is just investing in Echo. The expense of the projects, which are as yet dependent upon regulatory approvals, has not been uncovered.
“We are committed to bringing more people online to a faster internet,” Facebook’s vice president of network investments, Kevin Salvadori, and network investment manager Nico Roehrich wrote in a joint blog post. “As part of this effort, we’re proud to announce that we have partnered with leading regional and global partners to build two new subsea cables — Echo and Bifrost — that will provide vital new connections between the Asia-Pacific region and North America.”
Partners incorporate Indonesian firms Telin and XL Axiata, and Singapore-based Keppel.
The aim is for Echo to be finished by late 2023, while Bifrost is set to be done by late 2024.
Last May, Facebook reported designs to build a 37,000-kilometer (22,991-mile) long undersea cable around Africa to give it better internet access.
Google is additionally working on an underwater cable called Equiano, which expects to associate Africa with Europe. The web search titan has another unit, Loon, which makes high-altitude balloons that deliver 4G internet to rural communities. It recently declared an extension of that plan to Mozambique.
Facebook recently had plans to beam internet to remote areas using solar-powered drones. Called Aquila, the organization shuttered the project in 2018 yet has supposedly been working with Airbus to test comparable robots again in Australia.