Get ready to speed up

Microsoft and Facebook to build 6,600km subsea cable

san francisco — Microsoft and Facebook have joined hands to build a new, state-of-the-art subsea cable across the Atlantic Ocean that will help meet the growing customer demand for highspeed, reliable connections for cloud and online services for Microsoft, Facebook and their customers.

The 6,600km Marea cable will be the highest-capacity subsea cable to ever cross the Atlantic — eight fibre pairs and an initial estimated design capacity of 160Tbps, the companies said in a statement on Friday.

The construction of the cable will commence this August and is expected to be completed in October 2017.

“As the world is increasingly moving toward a future based on cloud computing, Microsoft continues to invest in our cloud infrastructure to meet current and future growing global demand for our more than 200 cloud services, including Bing, Office 365, Skype, Xbox Live and the Microsoft Azure platform,” said Christian Belady, general manager of data centre strategy, planning and development at Microsoft.

Microsoft and Facebook are collaborating on this system to accelerate the development of the next-generation of Internet infrastructure and support the explosion of data consumption and rapid growth of their respective cloud and online services. The submarine The 6,600km Marea cable will be the highest-capacity subsea cable to ever cross the Atlantic — eight fibre pairs and an initial estimated design capacity of 160Tbps cable system, to be operated and managed by Telxius, Telefonica’s new telecommunications infrastructure company, will also be the first to connect the US to southern Europe — from the data hub of Northern Virginia to Bilbao, Spain and then to network hubs in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

Telxius will serve as the operator of the system and sell capacity as part of their wholesale infrastructure business. This route is south of other transatlantic cable systems, thereby helping ensure more resilient and reliable connections for customers in the US, Europe and beyond.

The team has designed Marea to be interoperable with a variety of networking equipment. This new “open” design brings significant benefits for customers: lower costs and easier equipment upgrades, which leads to faster growth in bandwidth rates since the system can evolve at the pace of optical technology innovation. —