Facebook, Microsoft are laying a giant internet cable across the Atlantic

Facebook and Microsoft today announced a partnership to lay a subsea internet cable, the highest capacity ever, across the Atlantic Ocean.

The cable, called MAREA, the Spanish word for tide, will connect Northern Virginia to Bilbao in Spain, and will be capable of supporting 160 terabits of bandwidth across around 6,600km of ocean floor. Telxius, an infrastructure company owned by telecom giant Telefonica,has been hired to manage the cable system and expand it from Europe to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Construction will begin in August 2016 and is expected to be done by October 2017.

Microsoft director for global network acquisition, Frank Rey, said in a blog post, “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. This marks an important new step in building the next generation infrastructure of the internet." This is the first time that a tech company will be funding an undersea cable of its own, as opposed to utilising the services of an already existing cable system.

Both Facebook and Microsoft see huge benefit in setting up a dedicated network, seeing as they both run large scale cloud computing operations. Facebook sees more than a billion users on its platform, and Microsoft has a number of online services like Xbox Live, Bing, and Office 365, not to mention its Azure platform. MAREA has been designed for interoperability with other networking equipment so lower costs and equipment upgrades lead to a quicker growth of bandwidth rates.