Microsoft and Facebook intend to give customers the high-speed connectivity that they require through a new project that will see the construction of a massive undersea cable across the Atlantic.
The cable will be called "MAREA," which comes from the Spanish word meaning "tide," and it will stretch 6,600 kilometers (4,101 miles), connecting Virginia Beach, Va., to Bilbao, Spain. The project will include eight pairs of fiber optic strands, making it the highest capacity link across the Atlantic, and it will extend to network hubs in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
"We're seeing an ever-increasing customer demand for high-speed, reliable connections from Microsoft cloud services, including Bang, Office 365, Skype, Xbox Live, and Microsoft Azure," Frank Rey, director of global network acquisition for Microsoft Cloud infrastructure and operations, wrote in a statement on Thursday. Rey added that his company will respond to the growing use of cloud services by building a global infrastructure that will allow it to support reliable and low-latency connectivity to them.
MAREA will be built through a partnership with Telxius, Telefonica's telecommunications infrastructure company that has worked on subsea cables in the past and will be tasked with operating and managing this new system. Facebook and Microsoft are also giving the cable an "open" design so it can work with different networking equipment. This will, in turn, allow the system to "evolve at a pace" that will provide customers with lower costs, easier equipment upgrades and faster growth in bandwidth rates.
The project is also aimed at helping Facebook meet its goal of connecting people around the world.
"By creating a vendor-agnostic design with Microsoft and Telxius we can choose the hardware and software that best serves the system and ultimately increase the pace of innovation," Najam Ahmad, vice president of network engineering at Facebook, said in a statement.
The cable is only the latest internet infrastructure project to be taken on by tech companies, as Microsoft and Facebook, along with Google parent company Alphabet and Amazon, have both invested in trans-ocean cables in the past. Similar projects include Google's giant balloons and laser-equipped drones aimed at bringing Internet access to a variety of locations, while Microsoft is investing in other subsea and land fiber connection initiatives.
While neither Microsoft nor Facebook has revealed how much the project will cost, MAREA's construction is slated to begin in August 2016 and finish in October 2017.
