MAREA Cable Lands in Spain

According to Texius, Telefónica’s telecommunications infrastructure company, MAREA Cable landed at Arritera Beach in the Basque town of Sopelana, Spain on Tuesday. MAREA consortium members includes Facebook, Microsoft & Telxius.

Microsoft and Facebook designed MAREA as an open cable, to be interoperable with a variety of networking equipment. This new “open” design brings significant benefits for customers: 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. This is critical to ensure the Microsoft Cloud continuously improves to provide the highest availability and performance our customers need for their mission-critical workloads and data.

Microsoft and Facebook works with Telxius, building upon their longstanding experience in subsea cables on this innovative new system. Telxius will serve as the operator of the system and sell capacity as part of their wholesale infrastructure business.

MAREA will be the highest-capacity subsea cable to ever cross the Atlantic – featuring eight fiber pairs and an initial estimated design capacity of 160Tbps. According to Telxius: 

• The MAREA transatlantic subsea cable system will be 6,600 km.
• It will run between Virginia Beach (US) and Sopelana/Bilbao, Vizcaya, Spain.
• It is the first new cable system built south of the North Atlantic since 1999.
• It links southern Europe a data center concentration in the US, located in the North Virginia corridor.
• It is the first transatlantic cable landing in Virginia Beach and Sopelana/Bilbao, Vizcaya, Spain.
• The Sopelana landing is connected to an existing fiber network corridor in Europe linking major hubs like Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London.
• It is the highest-capacity transatlantic cable ever built with 8 fiber pairs and initial estimated design capacity of 160T Tbps.
• It has taken three weeks from the cable factory in the US to get to the European maintenance hub (Calais) and Sopelana.
• Works in Sopelana will take a few days for anchoring operation prior to proceeding to start the landing across the Atlantic.
• Estimated construction completion in Autumn 2017.