Our transatlantic Internet connections will soon become a lot more reliable. Microsoft, Facebook and infrastructure company Telxius announced they
Our transatlantic Internet connections will soon become a lot more reliable.
Microsoft, Facebook and infrastructure company Telxius announced they have finished work on a 4,000-mile-long undersea cable that can transmit 160 terabits of data per second, making it the highest capacity data cable crossing the Atlantic.
To put that in perspective, when you break it down into the gigabytes we’re familiar with, 160 terabits equals 20,000 GB of data. So, let’s say you’re downloading movies that are 2 GB in size, you could download 10,000 movies in one second. Pretty fast.
The cable — codenamed Marea — connects Virginia Beach, Va., and Bilbio, Spain.
Microsoft president Brad Smith said Marea, which will be available for use by 2018, should feed growing demand.
“Submarine cables in the Atlantic already carry 55% more data than trans-Pacific routes and 40% more data than between the U.S. and Latin America. There is no question that the demand for data flows across the Atlantic will continue to increase,” Smith said.
The cable will feature an open design, so it adapts better to changes in technology.
Frank Rey, the director of global network strategy for Microsoft’s Cloud Infrastructure and Operations division, said the decision to choose Virginia Beach for the U.S. connection was influenced by the aftermath for Hurricane Sandy, a “major disruption” to transatlantic connections since many data cables land in New York or New Jersey.
“Taking a step to improve the resiliency of the internet infrastructure was something we saw as a positive for the entire global network, and a positive for people who rely on their digital devices for so many aspects of their daily lives,” said Rey.
Demand for bandwidth has shifted from traditional telecom companies to large content providers, because the need for bandwidth is growing so rapidly that it makes economic sense for them to invest in their own infrastructure, said Gartner analyst David Smith.
“Rather than pay a telco, they’re going to build their own,” he said.
usatoday.com
