Microsoft and Facebook today announced a partnership to build a state-of-the-art undersea cable across the Atlantic Ocean. The project was named "MAREA", and aims to provide "high-speed, reliable connections for services companies.”
The two companies announced that the construction of the cable will start in August of 2016 and is expected to be completed by October of 2017.
The cable will have a length of 6.600 kilometers and will link a data node to North Virginia with Bilbao, Spain. It will then connect to network nodes in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
MAREA is said to be the fastest undersea cable currently crossing the Atlantic Ocean. With eight fiber pairs it has an initial speed estimate of up to 160Tbps. It will be managed by Telxius, a new company of Telefonica's telecommunications infrastructure.
“As the world moves towards a future based on cloud computing, Microsoft continues to invest in cloud infrastructure to meet the 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 that we will build with Facebook, Telxius will offer new, low-latency connections that will help meet growing demand for greater higher-speed capacity across the Atlantic," Belady said.
It remains to be seen whether the NSA's leaked 2013 program, and watching submarine cables from major technology companies like Google, is preparing for MAREA's search dives.
Of course, the announcement of Microsoft and Facebook does not mention anything about it better safety, αλλά ένα καλώδιο υψηλών ταχυτήτων μάλλον θα ενδιαφέρει πολύ την υπηρεσία πληροφοριών των ΗΠΑ, και όχι μόνο.
