(Image Credit: iStockPhoto/Courtney Keating)
Microsoft and Facebook have joined forces to build a major new high-speed transatlantic subsea cable designed to deliver unprecedented capacity and greater resilience for cloud and online services.
The collaboration aims to strengthen transatlantic connectivity to support services such as Bing, Office 365, Skype, Xbox Live, and Microsoft Azure. As global demand for cloud-based applications and streaming continues to grow, the companies say the new cable is a strategic investment to ensure faster, more reliable access and lower latency for users across continents.
“To better serve our customers and provide the reliable, low-latency connectivity they expect, we are investing in new and innovative ways to upgrade both the Microsoft Cloud and the global Internet infrastructure,” said Frank Rey, director of global network acquisition at Microsoft Corp. “This marks an important step in building the next-generation infrastructure of the Internet.”
The system, named MAREA, will be the highest-capacity subsea cable to cross the Atlantic. Stretching roughly 6,600 km, MAREA will include eight fiber pairs and is expected to deliver around 160 Tbps of total capacity, significantly increasing available bandwidth for transatlantic traffic.
To improve resilience and diversify routes, the cable will follow a more southerly path than existing transatlantic systems, becoming the first to directly link the United States with southern Europe. MAREA will land in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and Bilbao, Spain, with onward connections to major network hubs in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
Built for longevity and flexibility, MAREA uses an open, vendor-agnostic design intended to work with current and future network equipment. That openness reduces costs, simplifies upgrades, and allows the system to evolve alongside optical technology advances, enabling faster growth in bandwidth as new equipment becomes available.
“We’re constantly evaluating new technologies and systems to provide the best possible connectivity,” said Najam Ahmad, Vice President of Network Engineering at Facebook. “By adopting a vendor-agnostic approach with Microsoft and Telxius, we can select the hardware and software that best serve the system and accelerate innovation. We want to pursue more projects this way — enabling faster deployment through collaboration. This is likely how many subsea cable systems will be built in the future.”
MAREA represents a significant infrastructure investment intended to meet rising global traffic demands and to future-proof international communications. By increasing capacity, diversifying routing, and using an open design, the project aims to deliver more reliable, scalable connectivity for businesses and consumers worldwide.
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