Facebook Inc. this morning announced plans to deploy two new undersea internet cables that will connect the U.S. with Indonesia and Singapore.

Google LLC is participating in one of the projects as well. For the last few years, the tech industry’s largest players have been driving a sizable portion of global spending on subsea internet cables because they need growing amounts of network capacity to support their operations. They’re also contributing to upstream networking technology research. 

The two latest cables announced today, Echo and Bifrost, were described by Facebook executive Kevin Salvadori as a “very material investment” in an interview with Reuters. 

The first cable, Echo, is a collaboration between Facebook, Google and Indonesian telecommunications provider XL Axiata. It will run from Eureka, California, through Guam, from which it will continue to Singapore and Indonesia. Google Cloud Vice President of Networking Bikash Koley added that the cables could potentially be extended to more locations further down the line.

“Echo will be the first-ever cable to directly connect the U.S. to Singapore with direct fiber pairs over an express route,” Koley wrote on the Google Cloud blog this morning. “It will decrease latency for users connecting to applications running the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) regions in the area, home to some of the world’s most vibrant financial and technology centers.” 

As far as the construction schedule is considered, Echo is set to complete by 2023. It’s expected to be followed a year later by Bifrost, the other upcoming cable Facebook announced today, which the social network will deploy in partnership with Telkom Indonesia and Singapore-based conglomerate Keppel.

“In the Asia-Pacific region in particular, the demand for 4G, 5G, and broadband access is rapidly increasing. Echo and Bifrost will support further growth for hundreds of millions of people and millions of businesses,” Facebook’s Salvadori and Nico Roehrich, a network investment manager at the social network, wrote in a blog post.

The cables, the executives elaborated, will “increase overall transpacific capacity by 70%.”

Echo and Bifrost are the latest additions to the already sizable collection of submarine internet projects backed by Facebook. The social network’s previous investments include Marea, which at the time of its construction was the highest-bandwidth submarine cable ever to cross the Atlantic, and Havfrue, the first cable system in nearly two decades to traverse the North Atlantic. The construction of Havfrue was also supported by Google, which boasts a sizable internet cable portfolio of its own.

Facebook’s and Google’s investments in networking infrastructure on the ocean floor extend beyond fiber optic equipment. The companies are also applying their technical know-how to develop new technologies for transporting data more efficiently. 

In 2019, Facebook teamed up with Alcatel Submarine Networks to explore if aluminum could be used to conduct electricity inside internet cables. The social network’s researchers argued at the time that using aluminum might make it possible to provide more bandwidth than traditional copper-based setups. Separately, researchers at Google have developed a networking technique that reduces the amount of electronics necessary to manage data zipping through internet cables.

Photo: Facebook