INFRA Signal 539
Meta's Petal cable delivers petabit capacity across transatlantic route
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Petal, Meta's upcoming subsea cable, will deliver a petabit per second of capacity over a 7,000 km link between France and the United States, using multi-core fiber technology and entering service in 2029.
The cable establishes a new benchmark for transoceanic bandwidth, directly supporting Meta's growing data demands across Europe and North America. Its deployment will increase available network capacity for services requiring high-throughput, low-latency connections, influencing infrastructure planning for major cloud providers.
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Petal will be the first subsea cable to deploy multi-core fiber at scale, doubling capacity per fiber without adding physical infrastructure.
The system uses 2-core fiber technology within a 24 fiber-pair design to achieve 1 petabit per second over 7,000 km.
Meta states the project reduces material and carbon footprint compared to building multiple smaller capacity cables.
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The shift to 2-core fiber technology represents a fundamental change in subsea cable architecture, requiring new manufacturing processes and repeater designs to manage signal integrity across multiple cores.
Adopting this technology involves significant engineering costs, including specialized fiber production and upgraded repeater systems that must handle amplified signals across 96 cores within a single repeater body.
The project's success will validate spatial division multiplexing as a scalable path forward for future cable systems, potentially accelerating industry-wide adoption of multi-core fiber solutions.
Petal's design directly addresses the physical limits of current subsea capacity, demonstrating a practical approach to overcoming the Shannon Limit through core multiplication rather than incremental bandwidth increases.
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