Facebook, Microsoft Partnering on Trans-Atlantic Cable Project
A joint Microsoft/Facebook fiber submarine cable linking Virginia Beach, Virginia, to Bilbao, Spain, will be one the highest-capacity subsea cables ever and is expected to be laid within 17 months, Microsoft said in a blog post Thursday. Some companies with major data needs are increasingly building their own dedicated undersea infrastructure, TeleGeography Vice President-Research Tim Stronge told us Thursday. Facebook "is at a scale where they want to own fiber pairs of their own," simplifying network design rather than having to go through a submarine cable operator, he said.
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The new cable, called Marea (Spanish for "tide"), "future proofs" Facebook's network, said Stronge. If the company adds a feature to its service that generates extra traffic, it can be accommodated quickly, he said. Stronge's firm does telecom research including on submarine cables. Telefónica’s Telxius will operate the system and sell capacity, Microsoft said: It's designed to be "interoperable with a variety of networking equipment."
Microsoft said it faces "an ever-increasing customer demand for high speed, reliable connections for Microsoft cloud services, including Bing, Office 365, Skype, Xbox Live, and Microsoft Azure. As the world continues to move towards a future based on cloud computing, Microsoft is committed to building out the unprecedented level of global infrastructure required to support ever faster and even more resilient connections to our cloud services. This robust, global infrastructure will enable customers to more quickly and reliably store, manage, transmit and access their data in the Microsoft Cloud."
Marea will have eight fiber pairs and its initial design is for a capacity of 160 Tbps, Microsoft said. It will be the first subsea cable tying the U.S. to Southern Europe, it said.
Pointing to assertions the trans-Atlantic route is overbuilt and doesn’t need new infrastructure, Microsoft Infrastructure Group, Spain's Telefonica International and Facebook-owned Edge Cable Holdings in an FCC International Bureau filing Wednesday said “current demand trends indicate otherwise." They also said eight of the nine major U.S.-Europe systems date from 1998-2003.
Microsoft and the others told the FCC Marea will give Edge "capacity to support Facebook's global platform to connect its users and data centers" and give Microsoft capacity for its cloud services and connections for its data centers. Marea also will give Telefonica capacity for its wholesale capacity business in Europe and the Americas, they said.
While the Atlantic is overbuilt for capacity, "it's not overbuilt in terms of spare fiber pairs available to big content providers," Stronge said. He said Marea plans follow two other trans-Atlantic cables being built earlier this year -- the first trans-Atlantic activity since 2003 -- with more likely to follow. The cable likely will carry a $200 million-$300 million price tag, he said.
The cable should start commercial operation by Q1 2018, Microsoft and the others told the FCC. They said Marea will run on a non-common carrier basis, with Marea capacity being used either "as an input for services offered by their affiliates" or by providing bulk capacity to customers. It also will provide low-latency connectivity to data centers in Virginia and North Carolina. They asked to receive a cable landing license by April to meet their construction schedule.