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Microsoft headquarters

Microsoft and Facebook accept jointly announced their plan to build a new undersea cable connecting the United States to Southern Europe. The cable, dubbed Marea, volition link Virginia Embankment to Bilbao, an autonomous Basque customs located in northern Kingdom of spain. The two companies expect to break ground on the cable in Baronial 2022, with completion estimated by October 2022.

The new four,101 mile (6,600 km) cable is expected to be the fastest undersea cable ever constructed, with eight fiber pairs and an estimated data capacity of 160Tbps (20TB/s). The cable'due south road is deliberately different from conventional transatlantic cables, which typically terminate in New York or New Jersey. Microsoft claims that this routing conclusion volition help ensure consistent and reliable connections, presumably because information technology can serve as a fill-in if something goes incorrect with the electric current transatlantic cables.

Cloud-driven cablevision

The reason Microsoft and Facebook are teaming upwardly in the offset place is because they want to ensure robust infrastructure is in place to have advantage of their cloud computing initiatives. Microsoft's blog post states:

We're seeing an ever-increasing client demand for high speed, reliable connections for Microsoft cloud services, including Bing, Part 365, Skype, Xbox Alive, and Microsoft Azure. As the globe continues to move towards a future based on cloud computing, Microsoft is committed to building out the unprecedented level of global infrastructure required to back up ever faster and even more resilient connections to our deject services. This robust, global infrastructure will enable customers to more than quickly and reliably store, manage, transmit and access their data in the Microsoft Deject.

Afterwards in the post the visitor claims that Marea is designed to interoperate with a variety of network equipment, thanks to an open up design process that both companies believe will lower costs and make information technology easier to integrate upgrades to the cable as faster transmission standards and improvements in optical data transmission become available. Whether or not this is true is a matter of some debate. While the Open Compute Projection that Facebook started several years ago has reportedly salvage certain companies a groovy bargain of coin, information technology hasn't done a dandy chore of meeting the needs of enterprise IT departments. In this case, still, Microsoft and Facebook jointly own the cable and its hardware, which should simplify tech roll-outs and adoption.

MAREA-Cable

Presumably all data transmitted over the cable will be encrypted to prevent the NSA from wiretapping and intercepting data, only the web log post doesn't specifically mention this. Major companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have all been taking steps to reduce the adventure of NSA spying — foreign companies and individuals are much less likely to work with a vendor if they believe the company collaborates with the US government to monitor foreign citizens or corporations.