Microsoft and Facebook team up to lay Internet cable across the Atlantic
Technology
Microsoft and Facebook team up to lay Internet cable across the Atlantic
Microsoft and Facebook on Thursday announced they will work together to lay a high-speed Internet cable across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. A new, sub-sea "MAREA" cable was expected to be completed by late 2017, with the aim of meeting growing demand by the tech companies' customers for fast, reliable data connections. MAREA will be the highest-capacity sub-sea cable crossing the Atlantic, with an expected capacity of some 160 terabytes of data per second of data, according to the companies.
We want to do more of these projects in this manner — allowing us to move fast with more collaboration.
Facebook Vice President of Network Engineering Najam Ahmad
Microsoft aims for the cable — dubbed MAREA (Spanish for “tide”) — to help maintain and expand services for its cloud products, such as Bing, Office 365, Skype, Xbox Live and Microsoft Azure. Facebook, with 1.6 billion people on its social network, will use the cable to push vast amounts of information between its expanding network of data centers. It’ll also deal with data linked to Instagram and WhatsApp, two hugely popular apps that Facebook now owns.