Facebook, Microsoft Team Up On Underwater Internet Cable

Facebook and Microsoft has announced on Thursday that they will work together in laying the 4,000 mile subsea Internet cable in the Atlantic.

The joint project is dubbed as MAREA, which is a Spanish word for tide. It will provide up to 160 terabits per second bandwidth. This means the speed could be about 16 million times faster than the average connection at households.

According to Najam Ahmad, vice president of network engineering of social media company Facebook, "If you look at the cable systems across the Atlantic, majority land in the Northeast somewhere." He added, "This gives so many more options."

The rationale behind the project is the need of the two tech companies to quickly move information anywhere in the world given their expanding data centers.

Laying subsea cables is not actually something new. Many tech companies have been pouring in their resources on improved networking infrastructure in the recent years. Google has also invested on undersea cables laid in US, Japan, South America, and some other parts of Asia. This also aimed to respond to the demand of the users for faster and more reliable services from Google.

In a statement, Microsoft said the new project also considers interoperability with other networking equipment. The statement read: "This new open design brings significant benefits for customers: lower costs and easier equipment upgrades which leads to faster growth in bandwidth rates since the system can evolve at the pace of optical technology innovation."

Microsoft also sees this as an opportunity to meet the changing and growing demand of its consumers. The company claimed it had to increase its bandwidth for their clients to seamlessly experience Microsoft could services such as Skype, Bing, Office 365, and Azure.

USA Today reported that this project, MAREA, will be the highest-capacity underwater internet cable across Atlantic once completed.