Microsoft and Facebook Complete Enormous Undersea Cable
Last week, Microsoft, Facebook and Telxius, a telecommunication infrastructure company, announced the completion of the highest-capacity undersea cable to ever cross the Atlantic Ocean. The line, dubbed Marea, stretches 4,100 miles between Virginia Beach, US, and Bilbao, Spain.
The initiative is evidence of current and coming demand for data transfer between countries and continents. According to Microsoft, the cable can transmit 160 terabits of data per second, the equivalent of streaming 71 million high-definition videos at the same time, and is 16 million times faster than an average home Internet connection.
This is an impressive project not only in its scope, but also in its completion time. Construction of Marea started in August 2016, and it was only five months ago that the actual physical laying of the cable on the Atlantic Ocean floor began. In just over a year, manufacturing and installation was complete. This is nearly three times faster than typical undersea cable projects.
Its location at Virginia Beach, south of most existing transatlantic cables, should enable Marea to provide resiliency for people living in the US and Europe. Hurricane Sandy comes to mind here, as it caused major disruption in 2012 along the east coast of the US. Microsoft hopes Marea will help prevent problems with transatlantic connections in the aftermath of natural disasters like Sandy.
It’s important to note that large tech companies such as Microsoft and Facebook are eclipsing the bandwidth capacity of telecom operators, increasingly moving into the infrastructure space. They’re funding new cables themselves rather than joining telecom consortiums that already operate undersea cables. Microsoft, Facebook and their rivals depend on active Internet usage and have an incentive to regulate the pipes that control the connections. Google has also invested in two cables that run from the US to Japan and other countries in Asia, as well as South America (see Google under the Sea).
As cloud services become a significant portion of business models, companies such as Microsoft and Facebook need to gain control over the vast amounts of data they’re being paid to move around. For Microsoft and its clients, Marea will lead to improvements in cloud services for products such as Office 365, Azure and Xbox Live. Facebook will benefit by enabling smoother access to its platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp. The cable will also offer a path to network hubs in Africa, the Middle East as well as Asia, where the next billion Internet users are anticipated to come from.
Marea is expected to become operational in early 2018. At a time when telecom service providers are debating about the last mile, Marea takes the plunge to move bits along the bottom of the Atlantic.
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