Microsoft and Facebook are working with Telxius, Telefonica’s infrastructure unit, to lay a subsea cable under the Atlantic, as they look to control more of the infrastructure through which they provide services to their customers.

The companies said the cable will “help meet the growing customer demand for high speed, reliable connections for cloud and online services.”

Construction of the Marea cable will begin in August 2016 with completion expected in October 2017.

The firms said they want to accelerate the development of the next-generation of internet infrastructure and support the “explosion of data consumption” and rapid growth of their respective cloud and online services.

They claim Marea will be the highest-capacity subsea cable under the Atlantic with eight fibre pairs and an estimated design capacity of 160Tbp/s.

The system will be operated and managed by Telxius, Telefonica’s infrastructure company, and will be the first to connect the US to southern Europe, and then to network hubs in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

The route is south of other transatlantic cable systems, “thereby helping ensure more resilient and reliable connections for customers in the United States, Europe, and beyond.”

Telxius will serve as the operator of the system and sell capacity as part of their wholesale infrastructure business.

Microsoft and Facebook said they want the cable to be interoperable with a variety of networking equipment. They believe its “open” design will benefits customers as it means 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.

New technologies
According to Najam Ahmad, VP of network engineering at Facebook, the company is “always evaluating new technologies and systems in order to provide the best connectivity possible”.

He said that by creating a “vendor-agnostic” design, Facebook “can choose the hardware and software that best serves the system and ultimately increase the pace of innovation” adding that “we want to do more of these projects in this manner — allowing us to move fast with more collaboration. We think this is how most subsea cable systems will be built in the future.”

Both companies have in the past invested in other trans-ocean cables, as has Google.

Facebook’s Connectivity Lab is also working on drones, lasers and satellites to provide connectivity to more people and last month it strayed into areas usually occupied by traditional telecoms vendors when it announced it is testing two terrestrial systems.