Microsoft And Facebook Are Building 6,600km SubSea Cable For Faster Internet

Facebook and Microsoft are placing a massive cable across the middle of the Atlantic. The manufacture of the new “MAREA” cable will start in August and it is likely to be completed in October 2017, the companies said in a report on Thursday. The 6,600-kilometre cable, the first to join the United States with southern Europe, will be operated and accomplished by Telefonica SA’s telecoms infrastructure unit Telxius.

The cable is originally designed to carry 160 terabits of data per second, the companies said. The new MAREA cable will help meet the growing customer demand for, reliable, high speed connections for cloud and online services for Facebook, Microsoft and their customers.

You’re seeing an ever-increasing customer demand for high speed, reliable connections for Microsoft cloud services, including Office 365, Bing, Xbox Live, Skype, and Microsoft Azure. As the world continues to move towards a future based on cloud computing, Microsoft is dedicated to building out the unique level of global infrastructure required to support ever faster and even stronger connections to our cloud services. This healthy, global infrastructure will enable customers to more rapidly and reliably store, manage, transmit and access their data in the Microsoft Cloud.

“In order to better serve our customers and provide the type of reliable and low-latency connectivity They deserve, we are continuing to invest in new and innovative ways to continuously upgrade both the Microsoft Cloud and the global Internet infrastructure,” said Frank Rey, director, global network acquisition, Microsoft Corp. “This marks an important new step in building the next generation infrastructure of the Internet.”

“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,” said Najam Ahmad, a representative of Facebook.

Microsoft has also been testing with underwater data centers under its Project Natick, and last year tested a prototype on the sea floor for four months.

Underwater data centres, intended to be powered by renewable marine energy sources, and is expected to decrease the huge cost associated with cooling data centres that produce a lot of heat, and also to reduce the distance to connected populations.

On Thursday, Microsoft declined to disclose the financial details about MAREA. Facebook did not directly respond to the comment.

MAREA will be the highest-capacity subsea cable to ever cross the Atlantic – featuring eight fiber pairs and a primary estimated design capacity of 160Tbps. The new 6,600 km submarine cable system, to be operated and accomplished by Telxius, will also be the first to connect the United States to southern Europe: from Virginia Beach, Virginia to Bilbao, Spain and then beyond to network hubs in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. This way is south of existing transatlantic cable systems that mainly land in the New York/New Jersey region. Being physically separate from these other cables helps confirm more resilient and reliable connections for customers in the Europe, United States, and beyond.