Microsoft and Facebook are laying 160Tbit/s submarine cable between the US and Europe

Microsoft and Facebook announce a new internet connection between the state of Virginia in the US and the city of Bilbao in Spain. The construction of the 6600 km long fiber optic cable will start in August and should be completed in October 2017.

The companies call the cable Marea, the Spanish word for tide. According to Microsoft is concerned with the cable with the highest capacity that will be installed in the Atlantic Ocean. The cable will be provided with eight fiber pairs, the design is estimated to have a capacity of 160Tbit/s, or 20 terabytes per second.

Microsoft and Facebook have commissioned Telxius to install the cable. That company will continue to manage the cable after installation and will sell the remaining capacity to third parties. Telxius is the infrastructure arm of communications giant Telefónica.

The cable system will be located between Virginia Beach and Bilbao and will also be connected to hubs to Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The new cable route is located south of the existing transatlantic cables, which mainly come ashore in the US around New York and New Jersey.

The companies say they need the submarine cable to handle the ever-increasing data flow between data centers in the US and Europe. Facebook has 1.65 billion users worldwide and Microsoft wants to offer its Azure cloud service in 32 regions of the world. Microsoft invested in 2015 also in submarine network cables. Google also has its own cables in the ocean.