With an aim to provide reliable internet connection to the customers, Facebook and Microsoft jointly announced their plans to lay a massive internet cable across the Atlantic. This new giant sub-sea cable MAREA will reportedly provide up to 160 terabits per second of bandwidth and will stretch from Virginia to Bilbao, Spain, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
This gigantic under-sea cable will also let Microsoft and Facebook to move enormous amounts of data between the network hubs more effectively. The construction of MAREA will be starting in August this year and is projected to complete by October 2017.
Frank Rey, Director, Global Network Acquisition, Microsoft Corp. said, “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.”
Sub-sea cable MAREA
MAREA, the huge 6,600 km subsea cable featuring fiber pairs will be the first submarine cable to connect the U.S to Southern Europe. It will by far be the highest capacity subsea cable and Telxius, a global telecommunications infrastructure company will be operating and managing the entire system. As per the announcement made by the companies, it will be separate from other submarine cables in the Atlantic and thus will provide more reliable and resilient connections to the users.
Earlier last year, Microsoft announced its investment in subsea fiber cables. Companies like Hibernia and Aqua Comms are already partnered with Microsoft and with an aim to connect their data center globally, the Redmond giant has been investing in subsea fiber cables for quite a long. Also, Facebook has partnered consortia that operate other undersea cables, but this project seems to be different.
Head over to the official blogt to learn more MAREA.
