Facebook and Microsoft are teaming up to immerse themselves in an ambitious project to lay a high-capacity internet cable across the Atlantic.
Announcing the plan on Thursday, the pair said the cable will help meet growing customer demand for high speed, reliable connections for their plethora of cloud and online services.
Work on putting down the cable, which will run 3,750 miles (6,030 km) between Virginia Beach, Virginia and Bilbao, Spain, and then beyond to network hubs in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, is slated to begin in August, with completion expected in October, 2017.
Dubbed “Marea” (that’s the Spanish word for “tide,” in case you were wondering), the cable will have an estimated data capacity of a whopping 160 terabits per second, a speed that’ll make it the highest-capacity subsea cable to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Marea will be operated by Telxius, the telecommunications infrastructure company of communications giant Telefónica, which has longstanding experience of work with subsea cables.
Microsoft and Facebook noted that its cable will take a route south of existing transatlantic cable systems that mostly come into the New York and New Jersey region. “Being physically separate from these other cables helps ensure more resilient and reliable connections for our customers in the United States, Europe, and beyond,” the pair said.
Read More: Digital Trends
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