Facebook, Microsoft pair-up to build Atlantic subsea cable
Updated : 15:33
US tech giants Facebook and Microsoft are teaming up to build a high-specification undersea cable across the Atlantic to deliver speedy online and cloud services for their respective customers.
The cable – known as MAREA, the Spanish word for tide, and tailored to have a bandwidth of up to 160 terabytes a second – would be the highest capacity of its kind beneath the Atlantic Ocean, Bloomberg has reported.
It would run 6600 kilometres from Virginia Beach, Virginia, to Bilbao, Spain, and be operated by Telxius, a unit of Telefonica SA. Work would start in August and was expected to be finished in October 2017, the news agency said.
The move comes as both Microsoft and Facebook move to slake customer demand for speedy, reliable access to their respective services. Microsoft bought a stake in Facebook in 2007.