Facebook, Microsoft Partnership: Companies To Lay Transatlantic Cable, Transmitting 160 Terabits Per Second [VIDEO]
Microsoft and Facebook announced a rather interesting collaboration on Thursday, stating that they would be laying a giant underwater, transatlantic cable from Virginia, U.S.A. to Bilbao, Spain. The massive cable, one of the most advanced of its kind, is designed to deliver a very impressive 160 terabits per second of bandwidth.
The massive subsea cable, which the two tech titans have dubbed MAREA, the Spanish word for "tide," would stretch more than 4,100 miles of open ocean using a submarine cable system. Telxius, a massive infrastructure firm, is set to handle the construction of the massive undersea cable.
Considering that Microsoft transfers a gargantuan amount of data due to its hefty suite of services, and Facebook is hosting the output of its 1.65 billion users every day, the added capacity and capability brought about by MAREA would be a very welcome addition.
Frank Rey, Microsoft's director of global network acquisition, is highly optimistic about the project, stating that the presence of MAREA would give its customers far better Internet services than before.
"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," he said.
With the world continuously becoming more technocentric, tech giants such as Microsoft and Facebook are scrambling to provide better services to their consumers. Google, which owns a number of the world's most used services, has already begun investing in subsea cables as well.
Indeed, Google has already invested in two undersea cables stretching from the United States to Japan, as well as Brazil and several territories in Asia. What is interesting is the fact that tech giants like Google, and now Microsoft and Facebook, are building their own subsea cables at their own expense. Considering the amount of data each of these firms must move on an everyday basis, however, these corporations' investments in advanced undersea cables are not surprising at all.
Microsoft and Facebook's undersea cable is set to begin construction this coming August. It is expected to be completed by October 2017.
