Facebook and Microsoft partner to lay highest capacity transatlantic internet cable yet, connecting Virginia and Spain with a bandwidth of 160Tbps
Strange bedfellows decide to build 160 … Trevor Mogg / Digital Trends : Facebook and Microsoft dive underwater to lay a new internet cable to Europe BBC : Tech firms plan the highest capacity Atlantic data link Eric David / SiliconANGLE : Microsoft and Facebook join forces to lay giant internet cable across the Atlantic Andy Weir / Neowin : Microsoft and Facebook team up to build MAREA, a new transatlantic submarine cable Karl Utermohlen / InvestorPlace : Microsoft, Facebook Team Up on Undersea Internet Cable in the Atlantic Alissa Walker / Gizmodo : Facebook and Microsoft Will Run the Most Badass Undersea Cable in History Dan Goodin / Ars Technica : If Microsoft is banning stupid passwords, why does it still allow “Pa$$w0rd”? Queenie Wong / SiliconBeat : Facebook and Microsoft to build massive underwater cable across the Atlantic Ellie Zolfagharifard For / Daily Mail : Microsoft and Facebook are building a giant cable across the Atlantic: 4,100-mile-long subsea network … Shawn Knight / TechSpot : Facebook and Microsoft join forces to lay massive undersea cable across the Atlantic Alison Griswold / Quartz : Facebook and Microsoft are building an underwater cable across the Atlantic Laurent Giret / WinBeta : Microsoft and Facebook plan to cross the Atlantic with new undersea cable system Brian Feldman / New York Magazine : Microsoft and Facebook Team Up to Lay New Transatlantic Cable Mihăiă Bamburic / BetaNews : Microsoft stops you from using weak passwords Tweets: Nancy Scola / @nancyscola : This, big deal: “More than 2/3rds of the digital data moving across the Atlantic is traveling on private networks.” http://www.wired.com/... Thanks: @anectolts
Context & Ripple Effects
MAREA is the moment the big cloud companies stop renting transatlantic bandwidth and start building it: Facebook and Microsoft are laying a 160Tbps cable from Virginia to Spain, the highest-capacity Atlantic link announced to date, with Telxius later named as the third partner when the project reaches completion in 2017. It lands mid-surge — months earlier Google had already teamed with Facebook and Pacific Light Cable Network on a 120Tbps Los Angeles–Hong Kong route, so this is the second hyperscaler cable of the cycle, not a one-off experiment.
First-order effects
- Microsoft and Facebook gain direct, carrier-independent capacity between their US East Coast data center corridor and Southern Europe, cutting traditional telecom operators out of the middle of their own backbone.
Second-order effects
- The consortium model spreads fast: within about a year SoftBank, Amazon, and others announce the 60Tbps Jupiter cable to Japan and the Philippines, showing rivals treat co-owned subsea builds as standard practice rather than a novelty.
- Facebook and Nokia's successful test doubling existing undersea cable speeds from 13Tbps to 32Tbps (reported March 2017) pressures the economics of every future build — new cables must justify themselves against cheaper upgrades of old ones.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, ownership of the physical internet's chokepoints migrates from telecom carriers to a handful of cloud and social platforms, making bandwidth a vertically integrated input controlled by the same companies that sell the services riding on it.
The trend: Hyperscale cloud and platform companies are displacing telecom carriers as the primary builders and owners of global subsea infrastructure.