Facebook plans to lay almost 500 miles of fiber cable in Africa for better wireless internet, but the social media giant isn’t going it alone. Facebook is partnering with Airtel and BCS on the project, Redcode reported.

Rather than just leasing bandwidth on undersea cables and terrestrial connections operated by telecoms, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are building their own networking infrastructure both on land and across the seas, Wired reported in May.

They’re assuming a role traditionally played by telecom companies.

Facebook and Microsoft are laying a cable across the Atlantic from Virginia to Bilbao, Spain, moving digital data across 4,100 miles of ocean.

Google has invested in two undersea cables that stretch from the West Coast of the U.S. to Japan, another that connects the U.S. and Brazil, and a network of cables connecting parts of Asia.

The fact that these Internet giants are laying their own cables at their own expense shows just how much data they move. Facebook has its social network along with Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Google offers its search engine, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Maps, and more. Microsoft offers Bing, Office365, and its Azure cloud services.

The data they move dwarfs that of most others. More than two thirds of the digital data moving across the Atlantic is traveling on private networks— networks operated by the likes of Facebook, Google and Microsoft, according to telecommunications research firm Telegeography. That’s up from 10 percent just a few years ago. “It’s a tremendous change,” says Telegeography analyst Tim Stronge, Wired reported.

With so much data flowing across their systems, these companies are scrambling to build new infrastructure. In addition to building its own undersea cable, Facebook is buying up what’s called “dark fiber”—unused terrestrial cables—so that it can control how its data moves from place to place and move it more efficiently. Facebook is now using dark fiber “pretty much everywhere” as the company expands its network into new regions, said Najam Ahmad, Facebook’s vice president of network engineering.

“We’re starting to see more of the large Internet content providers looking to build more of their own networks—whether they are leasing dark fiber or laying down new cables to build new routes,” says Michael Murphy, president and CEO of telecom consultancy NEF. “It makes sense.”

In connecting to Bilbao in Spain, Ahmad says, the cable will provide a more efficient path to Africa.

From Redcode. Story by Kurt Wagner.

Facebook on Monday announced plans to lay nearly 500 miles of fiber cable in Uganda by the end of the year, infrastructure that Facebook believes will provide internet access for more than 3 million people.

Facebook is not, however, providing its own wireless network. The company is partnering with Airtel and BCS to provide the actual internet service, and says the fiber will offer more support for “mobile operators’ base stations.” The company also says that it’s “open” to working with other network providers down the line.

All three organizations are making some kind of financial commitment to the project, according to a person familiar with the deal, though it’s unclear who is paying for what.

The move to dig up ground and lay physical fiber cables is the latest in a string of efforts Facebook has made over the past two years to get more people online. Facebook’s mission is to connect everyone in the world with its social network, but that’s hard to do if significant portions of the world don’t have internet access.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been trying to fix that, both with infrastructure and with efforts to lower the cost of wireless data.

In India, for example, Facebook tried to make some internet services free for some users, including its own social network. Indian regulators pushed back because of net neutrality concerns, and the free service was ultimately blocked.

In 2015, Facebook started building solar-powered drones to fly high overhead and beam internet to rural places down below. The first test flight for one of these drones was completed in June, though it crashed upon landing. (Even so, the drone approach is, as far as we know, still very much part of the company’s long-term plans.)

But now Facebook is at it again, this time with fiber cables. It’s a new approach for the social giant, but not new to Silicon Valley. Alphabet has also been laying fiber in the U.S., though those efforts have hit road blocks, including layoffs, in part because digging up the dirt and laying fiber cable is expensive.

Facebook declined to share details on the cost of the fiber project in Uganda.

Africa is home to over 1.2 billion people, but only 226 million smartphones were connected to the internet by the end of 2015, according to The Guardian. That number is expected to triple by 2020.

Read more at Redcode.