Submarine fiber optic cable with speed 16 million times stronger than normal

Two major US technology corporations, Microsoft and Facebook, will cooperate to build a transoceanic fiber optic cable with a speed 16 million times faster than normal Internet connections.

The transatlantic fiber optic cable jointly built by Microsoft and Facebook has a speed of 160 terabits per second. Photo: All Canada Photos.

Called MAREA, the cable is designed to carry 160 terabits (a terabit equals 1,000 gigabits) per second in its initial phase. This is 16 million times faster than the bandwidth of a regular internet connection. Construction on the MAREA cable will begin in August this year and is expected to be completed in October 2017.

The first fiber-optic cable to connect the United States and Southern Europe, managed and operated by Telefonica SA’s telecommunications infrastructure subsidiary, MAREA will become the highest-capacity undersea fiber-optic cable to run across the Atlantic, from a data gateway in northern Virginia, the United States, to Bilbao, Spain, and then to network gateways in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

"The MAREA trans-oceanic fiber optic cable we are building with Facebook and Telxius will provide new connectivity with less latency, meeting the growing demand for high-speed transmission across the Atlantic," said Christian Belady, General Manager of Data Center, Solutions, Strategy and Development at Microsoft Corporation.

The project comes nearly two years after Google, now Alphabet, agreed to a $300 million investment deal with five Asian countries to develop and operate a trans-Pacific fiber-optic cable network connecting the United States and Japan.

Corporations chose Virginia as the starting point for their fiber-optic networks because of its concentration of data centers, including those of Facebook and Microsoft. By connecting to Spain, the fiber-optic line will provide better connectivity to Europe and other continents.

According to VnE