On Thursday, the 26th of May, Microsoft, along with social networking giant Facebook, had announced that they will be creating a high-speed Internet sub-sea cable system that will connect southern Europe and the United States across the Atlantic. This is in order to meet a growing demand for faster and more stable Internet-connectivity services.
Microsoft and Facebook Partners Together to Build Sub-Sea Cable Across the Atlantic
Cloud services of Microsoft include that of Xbox Live, Office 365, Skype, their own search engine Bing, and their cloud computing platform Azure. These will all benefit with the construction of this sub-sea cable. Said cable is that of a 6,600-kilometer network, and it is also known as the Marea cable. It has been estimated that it will have a capacity of 160-terabytes of data per second. It is also expected that construction will start on August and it will be completed by the month of October next year.
For those who are wondering why it is called the Marea cable is because it is the Spanish word for “tide.” The Microsoft and Facebook cable network will stretch from Northern Virginia to Bilbao, Spain. Furthermore, it will be operated by Telxius, which is a telecommunications infrastructure firm that is owned by Spanish company Telefonica. Once the Marea cable is completed, it will be one of many connecting the world.
There are already countries that are connected together with the use of an undersea cable to provided Internet connectivity, and the like, to each other. Take for example Singapore, as it is known to be one of the world’s top submarine cable hubs. Furthermore, it also has an air hub, a data hub, and a sea hub. Even before the 20th century rolled in, Singapore was already a landing point for submarine telegraph cables that would deliver messages to and from Britain and Asia. Skip to modern times and there are already many modern submarine cable systems that land in Singapore. Therefore, it acts as a central hub that can connect to countries in practically every continent in the globe, except Antarctica.
It is clear why Microsoft, and even Facebook, would result to building undersea cables rather than launch satellites into space as the former option is a lot cheaper than the latter. CNN reported back in 2015 that there are over 99-percent of the world’s international communications are still being transmitted with the use of sub-sea cables. This is even when we already have the technology to launch satellites into space.