Microsoft and Facebook will lay the MAREA Internet cable on the bottom of the Atlantic

Microsoft and Internet giant Facebook have agreed to jointly contribute to the global Internet infrastructure. In August, they will begin the construction of a high-capacity underwater transatlantic cable that they will finance. The project is scheduled for completion in 14 months, by October 2017.

The project will be called MAREA (which in Spanish means “tide”), and will connect the shores of North America and Europe - more precisely, the coast of Virginia and Spain. In a press release, Microsoft claims that it will be the highest-speed cable at the time of installation.

Eight optical pairs will allow data transfer with a theoretical speed of 160 Tbps. The cable length of 6,600 km will run through the route Virginia Beach - Bilbao, which is much to the south of the extensive cable system, usually located in the New York area. This physical separation will help increase the infrastructure safety margin.

Microsoft and Facebook have developed MAREA so that it is compatible with a large number of network equipment. The main motivation for Microsoft is quick and smooth access to the Microsoft Cloud service.

The project will be implemented by the Spanish company Telxius, a daughter of a major telecommunications provider Telefónica.