Atlantic High Power Submarine Cable

Transatlantic data traffic will continue to grow as more consumers use smart mobile devices to access the Internet. According to a Brookings study, 93 percent of mobile devices in the U.S. and 83 percent in Western Europe will be smart devices as early as next year.

Microsoft, Facebook and Telxius, a Spanish telecommunications infrastructure company, have joined forces in a joint venture to lay a new transatlantic submarine cable between the U.S. city of Virginia Beach and the Spanish city of Bilbao.

The laying of the cable has been completed and commissioning is planned for early 2018. Called Marea (Spanish: "Tide"), the cable link between the USA and Europe is more than 6400 kilometers long and, with a transmission speed of 160 terabits per second, the most powerful transatlantic submarine cable.

It's more than 16 million times faster than the average home Internet connection and offers the ability to stream 71 million HD videos simultaneously.

The connection point to Marea in Bilbao also allows network hubs to be realized in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The enormous bandwidth will help meet the rapidly growing global demand for Internet and cloud services such as Microsoft Azure.