Microsoft, Facebook to build transatlantic subsea cable

Microsoft and Facebook on Thursday announced they will work together to lay a high-speed Internet cable across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. This route is south of existing transatlantic cable systems that primarily land in the New York/New Jersey region.

The construction of the cable will begin in August and is expected to be complete in October 2017.

The companies are working to develop the “next-generation of Internet infrastructure”, benefiting both cloud and online services customers for Microsoft and Facebook.

Microsoft said it needed the increased bandwidth to it could provide high speed, reliable connections for customers using Microsoft cloud services, which include its search engine Bing, Office 365, Skype, Xbox Live, and Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure.

Facebook and Microsoft are naming the cable project “Marea”, which means “tide” in Spanish. Being physically separate from these other cables helps ensure more resilient and reliable connections for our customers in the United States, Europe, and beyond.

The 4,100 mile submarine cable system will be operated and managed by Telxius, Telefónica’s telecommunications infrastructure company, and has a planned capacity of 160 terabytes per second.

The 6,600 kilometer cable system will also be the first connecting the United States and southern Europe, running from Northern Virginia to Bilbao, Spain, Microsoft and Facebook said.

The team further says, “Microsoft and Facebook designed MAREA to be interoperable with a variety of networking equipment”. To keep extending, these sorts of organizations are progressively moving into the infrastructure business, whether that be Amazon with its transportation network or Facebook and Microsoft with data operations to reach other parts of the globe.

Facebook wants to make it possible for people to have deep connections and shared experiences with the people who matter to them most-anywhere in the world, and at any time.

The tech companies will help design the subsea cable which will run between Virginia in the USA and Bilbao, Spain.

Internet companies often pay to use cables owned by telecommunications providers, but the new project won’t be the first to be owned by a US tech company.

Now there are about 337 terabytes of potential capacity across the Atlantic.