Strategies for Implementing ZR Technology in Meta's Backbone Network
Ruijie Luo, Onur Turkcu, Sandrine Pasqualini, Enrico Torrengo, Jeffrey T. Rahn, Alberto Herrero Mediavilla, Andrey Golovanov, Alexander Nikolaidis, Debottym Mukherjee · 2025
Meta operates one of the largest global optical backbone network to support its business across social media, AI training, virtual/augmented reality, etc. The rapid traffic growth on the network leads to significant network design challenges in how to support this growth with limited space/power/cost budget. To address these challenges, we proposed a set of strategies to evolve our backbone network towards a point-to-point architecture, also implementing ZR optics to achieve high efficiency gains in fiber and site investments.