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Subsea Network: Microsoft & Facebook To Build Giant Cable Across The Atlantic

By Bridget
03 June 2016   |   5:13 pm
Microsoft and Facebook are building a massive cable across the Atlantic Ocean to meet growing demand for high-speed cloud and online services. Dubbed MAREA, the cable is initially designed to carry 160 terabits of data per second, which is around 16 million times the bandwidth of your home internet connection. The 4,100 mile (6,600 km)…

Microsoft and Facebook are building a massive cable across the Atlantic Ocean to meet growing demand for high-speed cloud and online services. Dubbed MAREA, the cable is initially designed to carry 160 terabits of data per second, which is around 16 million times the bandwidth of your home internet connection.

The 4,100 mile (6,600 km) cable, the first to connect the US with southern Europe, will be operated and managed by Telefonica SA’s telecoms infrastructure unit Telxius.

It will be the highest-capacity subsea cable to ever cross the Atlantic, running from the data hub of Northern Virginia to Bilbao, Spain and then to network hubs in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

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‘[It will meet] growing global demand for our more than 200 cloud services, including Bing, Office 365, Skype, Xbox Live and the Microsoft Azure platform,’ said Christian Belady, General Manager, Datacenter Strategy, Planning & Development, Microsoft Corp.

‘The MAREA transatlantic cable we’re building with Facebook and Telxius will provide new, low-latency connectivity that will help meet the increasing demand for higher-speed capacity across the Atlantic.’

The move comes nearly two years after Google, which is now Alphabet, agreed with five Asian companies to invest about $300 million to develop and operate a trans-Pacific cable network connecting the US to Japan.

Typically, companies like Microsoft and Facebook join larger consortium of technology companies to create cables. The latest move means that the two technology giants can sell their excess capacity to third parties
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Google also has another cable that connects the US and Brazil, and a network of cables that connect parts of Asia. As well as building an undersea cable, Facebook is buying something known as ‘dark fiber’, the name given to unused terrestrial cables, according to an in-depth report in Wired.

The companies chose Virginia to start the cable network because it’s a major hub for data centers that include facilities used by Facebook and Microsoft.

By connecting it to Spain, the cable will provide a better network for Europe as well as Africa, the Middle East, and Asia and satisfy customers internet needs around the world.

‘We’re always evaluating new technologies and systems in order to provide the best connectivity possible,’ said Najam Ahmad, Vice President of Network Engineering at Facebook.

‘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. ‘We want to do more of these projects in this manner — allowing us to move fast with more collaboration.

‘We think this is how most subsea cable systems will be built in the future.’

Watch the clip below for more insight!

https://youtu.be/_VKmMW2qTDo

Source: techfactslive.com

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