The 2 tech superpowers, Microsoft and Facebook, will soon be joining forces to build a really long subsea cable for Internet connectivity across the Atlantic Ocean. The cable is being called ‘MAREA’ and aims to meet the growing demand of high speed data connectivity “for cloud and online services for Microsoft and Facebook.” Construction of the cable is expected to commence in August this year, with a completion date set for October 2017.
MAREA is touted to be the highest capacity subsea cable going across the Atlantic. The cable will feature 8 fibre pairs and will be capable of transmitting data at 160 terabytes per second! MAREA will also be the first such cable to connect the United States to Southern Europe: from Virginia to Bilbao, Spain and then beyond to network hubs in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
In a recent blogpost announcing the partnership, Microsoft wrote, “We’re seeing an ever-increasing customer demand for high speed, reliable connections for Microsoft cloud services, including Bing, Office 365, Skype, Xbox Live, and Microsoft Azure. As the world continues to move towards a future based on cloud computing, Microsoft is committed to building out the unprecedented level of global infrastructure required to support ever faster and even more resilient connections to our cloud services. This robust, global infrastructure will enable customers to more quickly and reliably store, manage, transmit and access their data in the Microsoft Cloud.”