Microsoft and Facebook are building together a 6,600 km submarine cable system that they state will provide speeds of up to 160 Tbps, which they note will represent “the highest-capacity subsea cable to ever cross the Atlantic.”
According to a press release, that construction of the cable system, called Marea, is set to start this summer and be completed in October 2017. Marea will stretch from Virginia Beach in the U.S. to Bilbao, Spain, and extend to network hubs in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The cable will help meet the growing customer demand for high speed, reliable connections for cloud and online services for the firms.
Teléfonica subsidiary Telxius will operate and manage Marea, which will feature eight fiber pairs as well as market the cable’s capacity. “(This transatlantic cable we’re building with Facebook and Telxius will provide new, low-latency connectivity that will help meet the increasing demand for higher-speed capacity across the Atlantic,” said Christian Belady, general manager of Microsoft data center strategy, planning and development. “By building the cable along this new southern route, we will also increase the resiliency of our global network, helping ensure even greater reliability for our customers.”
The release said that Microsoft has invested more than $15 billion in building a resilient cloud infrastructure and cloud services that are highly available and highly secure while lowering overall costs. “By creating a vendor-agnostic design with Microsoft and Telxius, we can choose the hardware and software that best serves the system and ultimately increase the pace of innovation,” said Najam Ahmad, Facebook’s vice president of network engineering. “We want to do more of these projects in this manner — allowing us to move fast with more collaboration. We think this is how most subsea cable systems will be built in the future.”
