Microsoft and Facebook today announced a partnership to build a state-of-the-art undersea cable across the Atlantic Ocean. The project, dubbed “MAREA,” aims to provide “high-speed, reliable connections for enterprise services.”
The two companies announced that construction of the cable will begin in August 2016 and is expected to be completed by October 2017.
The cable will be 6,600 kilometers long and will connect a data hub in Northern Virginia to Bilbao, Spain. It will then connect to network nodes in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
MAREA is said to be the highest-speed submarine cable currently crossing the Atlantic Ocean. With eight pairs of fibers, it has an initial estimated speed of up to 160Tbps. It will be operated by Telxius, a new telecommunications infrastructure company of Telefonica.
“As the world moves toward a cloud-based future, Microsoft continues to invest in cloud infrastructure to meet current and future growing needs and global demand for its more than 200 cloud services. These include Bing, Office 365, Skype, Xbox Live and the Azure platform,” said Christian Belady, head of Microsoft’s data center division.
“With the MAREA transatlantic cable we will build with Facebook, Telxius will offer new, low-latency connections that will help meet the growing demand for more capacity and higher speeds across the Atlantic,” said Belady.
It remains to be seen whether the NSA program that was leaked in 2013, and monitors undersea cables of major tech companies like Google, is preparing for MAREA search dives.
Of course, the announcement from Microsoft and Facebook does not mention anything about security, but a high-speed cable would probably be of great interest to the US intelligence service, and not only.
