Microsoft and Facebook complete Transatlantic Internet cable 'Marea'

Microsoft and Facebook have finished laying the 4,000-mile transatlantic cable, Marea, the companies announced last week.

The cable project that began last year connects Virginia Beach, Virginia, and Bilbao, Spain, and is a joint project between Microsoft, Facebook, and Telxius, a telecom infrastructure company. Dubbed Marea, Spanish for “tide,” the cable is situated many miles south of the current connection points on both continents that helps safeguard against natural disasters or other major events disrupting connectivity across the Atlantic.

Microsoft touted the new intercontinental connection as a "feat of engineering" in a blog post, pointing out that the cable’s “open” design enables it to upgrade with more advanced technologies, with a massive bandwidth capability of 160 terabytes of data per second which is "16 million times faster than the average home internet connection."

"We're energized by the impact the Marea subsea cable will have on the advancement of cloud computing and digital services," Suresh Kumar, corporate vice president of Microsoft cloud infrastructure and operations wrote. "Marea will enhance the Microsoft Cloud … through additional capacity and resiliency."

Marea is one of the many endeavors Microsoft is making to improve its cloud service amid an increasingly competitive market. Just recently, the Redmond-based company announced that it was adding Availability Zones to its Azure cloud platform. Zones are basically clusters of data centers within a single cloud region that are geographically isolated from one another and are designed to protect against location-specific failures in one of the other zones.