Microsoft and Facebook will place a cutting-edge undersea cable across the Atlantic Ocean, stretching 6,600 kilometers or more than 4,100 miles from Virginia Beach, Va., to Bilbao, Spain, capable of hurtling data under the ocean at speeds of 160 Terabits per second.
The companies say the new project, called Marea, will be the highest-capacity subsea cable ever placed across the Atlantic, the first to connect the U.S. to southern Europe. Construction will begin in August 2016, with completion scheduled for October 2017, the companies say.
“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,” said Microsoft’s Frank Rey in a post announcing the plan.
“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.”
Microsoft and Facebook aren’t disclosing the total cost or the terms of their partnership. The cable will be operated and managed by Telxius, the telecom infrastructure company created earlier this year by Spain’s Telefónica Group. “Marea” is Spanish for “tide,” and a Microsoft representative says the name is an homage to the subsea effort and the route to Bilbao, Spain.
The cable, consisting of eight fiber pairs, will go on to connect to network hubs in Europe, Africa the Middle East and Asia. Microsoft says it will be separate from existing transatlantic cable systems, taking a more southerly route, which will make it more resilient and reliable. The cable will have an open design that will allow it to work with a variety of networking equipment.