Facebook and Microsoft team on transatlantic high-speed data cable

Microsoft and Facebook plan to lay 6,600 kilometers (4,100 miles) of high-speed cable across the Atlantic, from Virginia Beach to Bilbao, Spain. This will be the highest capacity data link between the US and Europe.

The project, called "Marea" (meaning "tide" in Spanish), is expected to begin in August 2016 and to finish in October 2017. The project will be managed by Spanish telecommunications firm Telefonica, which will sell any unused capacity on the cable to other customers.

Composed of eight fiber pairs, the cable will have an initial estimated data-carrying capacity of 160 terabytes per second (a terabyte is one trillion bytes, enough to store around 500 hours' worth of movies).

"In order to better serve our customers and provide the type of reliable and low-latency connectivity they deserve, we are continuing to invest in new and innovative ways to continuously upgrade both the Microsoft Cloud and the global Internet infrastructure," said Frank Rey, director, global network acquisition, Microsoft Corp. "This marks an important new step in building the next generation infrastructure of the Internet."

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