14 DAY TRIAL // Undersea cables are what makes the internet go, though few people realize this. There are quite a few of them, crossing the Atlantic and the Pacific and a few going round Africa, India and so on.
They provide huge amounts of bandwidth, but the internet is constantly sucking up more. So more of them are being deployed all the time.
But, of course, these cables are quite expensive so, usually, several companies, telcos and others that have an interest in moving data around, get together on a project.
Contributors can be quite diverse, telecommunications companies and ISPs top the list, but financial companies are also involved or even companies such as Google.
And now, Facebook is getting in as well as it confirmed that it's contributing to the construction of a new undersea cable to link Malaysia to Korea and Japan. The cable will also spread to China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam and Singapore.
Facebook is contributing to the Asia Pacific Gateway project. Its exact investment hasn't been revealed, but it is said that Facebook is getting several terabits' worth of bandwidth out of the deal. The cable will have a total capacity of 54 Tbps.
Facebook has no plans to build a data center in Asia, so network connections are critical, especially since Malaysia and most of the countries in the region haven't yet been overtaken by the social network or, at the very least, there's still a huge potential for growth.
Of course, even if Facebook doesn't plant to have a data center in Asia at the moment, like it's claiming, it is at least thinking about the prospect. In that case, having a dedicated and fast link to its data centers back home means that it will be able to move data from one place to another faster than if it were relying on the existing connections.