VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. – Microsoft and Facebook announced an agreement to build a new, state-of-the-art subsea cable across the Atlantic Ocean from Virginia Beach to Bilbao, Spain. Construction for the cable will start in August and expected to be completed in October 2017.
The new “Marea” cable will help meet the growing customer demand for high speed, reliable connections for cloud and online services for Microsoft, Facebook and their customers. Marea will be the highest-capacity subsea cable to ever cross the Atlantic. Eight fiber pairs and an initial estimated design capacity of 160Tbps. The submarine cable system will be operated and managed by Telxius and will be the first to connect the United States to southern Europe.
“As the world is increasingly moving toward a future based on cloud computing, Microsoft continues to invest in our cloud infrastructure to meet current and future growing global demand for our more than 200 cloud services, including Bing, Office 365, Skype, Xbox Live and the Microsoft Azure platform,” said Christian Belady, General Manager, Datacenter Strategy, Planning & Development, Microsoft Corp.
Microsoft and Facebook designed Marea to be work with a variety of networking equipment and will cost customers less and equipment upgrades will be easier. This will lead to faster growth in bandwidth rates.
“We want to do more of these projects in this manner — allowing us to move fast with more collaboration. We think this is how most subsea cable systems will be built in the future,” said Najam Ahmand, Vice President of Network Engineering at Facebook.
