Less than two years have passed since the beginning of a joint project of Microsoft, Facebook, and infrastructure companies Telxius on laying a transatlantic fiber optic Internet cables “Marea” with a length of 6600 km, connecting the city of Virginia beach (USA) and Bilbao (Spain).

Cable ensure the transmission of information at a speed of 160 terabytes/sec, which is equivalent to the simultaneous broadcast 71 million of streaming HD video. The line will be operational in early 2018. It will allow us to meet the growing demand for Internet infrastructure around the world and make it more reliable.

Marea will be the most high-capacity transatlantic submarine transmission line, which after Spain connected with the network hubs of Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. It will help to meet the growing global demand for more than 200 cloud services, including Bing, Office 365, Skype, Xbox Live and the Microsoft Azure platform.


Source — WIRED