Microsoft and the Facebook today announced a partnership to build a state-of-the-art undersea cable across the length of the Atlantic Ocean. The project was named "MAREA", and its goal is to provide "high-speed, reliable connections for company services."
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 underwater cable of the highest magnitude than those currently crossing the Atlantic Ocean. With eight pairs of fibers has an initial speed estimate of up to 160Tbps. It will be managed by Telxius, a new telecommunication company in Telefónica.
“As the world moves toward a cloud-based future, 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, the Office 365, Skype, Xbox Live and the platform Azure," 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 program leaked in 2013, which tracks undersea cables of major tech companies like Google, is getting ready to dive search of MAREA.
Of course, Microsoft's announcement and Facebook does not mention anything about security, but a high-speed cable is likely to be of great interest to the US intelligence service, and not only.
