Microsoft and Facebook Thursday announced a joint plan to lay a new, state-of-the art subsea cable across the Atlantic.
Microsoft and Facebook said the new MAREA —Spanish for "tide"— giant underwater cable will help meet the growing demand for high speed, reliable connections for cloud and online services for their customers.
The parties have cleared conditions to go "Contract-In-Force" with their plans, and construction of the cable will commence in August 2016 with completion expected in October 2017.
Microsoft and Facebook said they designed MAREA to be interoperable with a variety of networking equipment. They claimed that this new "open" design brings significant benefits for customers: lower costs and easier equipment upgrades which leads to faster growth in bandwidth rates since the system can evolve at the pace of optical technology innovation.
MAREA will be the highest-capacity subsea cable to ever cross the Atlantic - featuring eight fiber pairs and an initial estimated design capacity of 160Tbps. The new 6,600 km submarine cable system, to be operated and managed by Telxius, will also be the first to connect the United States to southern Europe: from Virginia Beach, Virginia to Bilbao, Spain and then beyond to network hubs in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. This route is south of existing transatlantic cable systems that primarily land in the New York/New Jersey region.
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