Microsoft and Facebook today announced plans to build "MAREA" - a new, subsea cable across the Atlantic. The cable will help meet demand for high speed, reliable connections for cloud and online services for Microsoft, Facebook and their customers. The parties have cleared conditions to go "Contract-In-Force" with their plans, and construction of the cable will commence in August 2016 with completion expected in October 2017.

As the world continues to move towards a future based on cloud computing, Microsoft is trying to build out the global infrastructure required to support ever faster and even more resilient connections to its cloud services.

MAREA will be the highest-capacity subsea cable to ever cross the Atlantic – featuring eight fiber pairs and an initial estimated design capacity of 160Tbps. The new 6,600 km submarine cable system, to be operated and managed by Telxius, will also be the first to connect the United States to southern Europe: from Virginia Beach, Virginia to Bilbao, Spain and then beyond to network hubs in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. This route is south of existing transatlantic cable systems that primarily land in the New York/New Jersey region. Being physically separate from these other cables helps ensure more resilient and reliable connections.

Microsoft and Facebook designed MAREA to be interoperable with a variety of networking equipment.