The underwater cable will have a capacity of 160Tbps and will be ready by next October.

In a move that will aid the movement of data back and forth from the U.S to Europe, Facebook and Microsoft have come launched a collaboration to build a massive underwater data cable that will connect both continents.

Dubbed as “MAREA,” the underwater cable, which should be ready by October 2017, will have an estimated data capacity of 160 Tera bits per second (Tbps), thus making it the cable with the highest capacity to have crossed the Atlantic.

In the increasing digitisation of the world, it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out what could be the purpose of this infrastructure in a world where IoT is increasingly becoming common place.

For Microsoft, its Azure cloud services is a bandwidth hog, not mentioning its other cloud-based products such as Xbox Live, Skype, Bing and Office.

The MAREA system will not just be for the sole purpose of Facebook and Microsoft though. The cable will be managed by Telxius, a division of the Telefónica telecommunications, and will sell off the excess capacity to other companies.

The cable will stretch from Virginia Beach in the U.S to Bilbao Spain. This is rather unique since most trans-Atlantic cables typically originate from the New Jersey / New York area. Perhaps the availability of large data centres in Virginia was the reason for choosing the area. Furthermore, it appears that that this choice has been made so as to allow for more “resilient and reliable” data connections, criteria which are of utmost importance today with the world teeming with internet-enabled devices.