Facebook and Microsoft have joined hands to build a high-speed internet cable network under the Atlantic Ocean that will transmit a vast amount of data within seconds. The cable titled MAREA (meaning tide) will cover 4,100 miles stretching from Northern Virginia to Bilbao in Spain, and will carry close to 160TB of data per second, which is million times faster than the conventional home connection.
The announcement came from Microsoft which states that it is working with Facebook along with Telxius, a subsidiary of Telefonica, to build a cable that will have more capabilities than any other undersea cables. The work on the same will begin from August this year and is expected to complete by 2017. Meanwhile, there is no information on the project cost.
Frank Rey, Director of Global Network Acquisition at Microsoft, mentioned in a blog post that there has been an ever-increasing customer demand for high-speed, reliable connections for Microsoft cloud services. He further added,
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.
Both Microsoft and Facebook have been investing aggresively on consolidating its infrstructure from past few years now. If we look at the operations of Microsoft than the company maintains a massive cloud system with a suite of services like Office 365, Bing, Azure, and more that needs high speed internet connectivity. While on the other hand, Facebook hosts a userbase of around 1.65 billions users. With MAREA, both social media and computer software titans will get a robut and reliable infrastructure to transfer data.
Developing own infrastructure is not the new trend that these companies are following. Search giant Google has made investments in two submarine cables spanning from US to South America, Japan, and other parts of Asia. Another company that has its attention focused in this area is Amazon Web Services (AWS) that has made its first investment in an undersea cable project.
