MAREA is a new 6,644 km submarine cable system across the Atlantic, connecting the United States to southern Europe, landing at Virginia Beach in the US and Bilbao in Spain. MAREA cable system has been in-service since April 2018.

Marea means “tide” in Spanish.  Marea cable system is the first subsea cable connecting Virginia and Spain.

Facebook and Microsoft jointly designed MAREA as the first Open Cable System in the world. Telxius joined in later as the thrid party of MAREA consortium, operates and manages the MAREA cable system. TE SubCom is the turn key suppier for MAREA cable system.

According to FCC documents, Facebook owns two fiber pairs on MAREA, Microsoft owns two fiber pairs on MAREA, Telxius owns the remaining 4 fiber pairs. And AWS has acquired from Telxius a fiber pair on MAREA cable system on IRU basis.

In the US, the MAREA cable lands at Telxius' Virginia Beach Cable Landing Station (CLS) at 1900 Corporate Landing Parkway in Virginia Beach, where hosts Telxius' BRUSA cable and Google's Dunant cable as well. Microsoft is the landing party in the US.

In Spain, the MAREA cable lands at Telxius' Bilbao Cable Landing Station. Telxius is the landing party in Spain. Within a few kilometers from the MAREA cable landing station in Bilbao, Telxius operates the carrier neutral Derio Communications Hub, which is specially designed to channel all the MAREA capacity and connect it to the main communication nodes in Europe. 

MAREA was initially designed with eight fiber pairs and 160Tbps of system capacity, specifically optimized for maximum capacity per fiber pair. It utilizes a large-area, low-loss optical fiber type based on a pure silica core and has excellent performance. The MEREA cable system also has shorter amplifier spacing of 56 km (comparing with the normal amplifier spacing of about 70km in other cable systems designed with 100Gbps DWDM technology), allowing an excellent optical signal-to-noise ratio.

After its ready for service, there have been trials on the MAREA cable system with 400G DWDM technology supplied by both Infinera and Acacia, which demonstrated the OPEN Cable design and the transmission capacity of 26.2Tbps per fiber pair and system capacity of 200Tbps.

The latest trial with Infinera's ICE6 optical engine in the end of 2020 demonstrated an industry record on error-free transmission of 30 Tbps of total capacity on a single fiber pair and 700 Gbps data rate per wavelength over the 6640km cable, and commercially deployable results with 28 Tbps of total capacity on a single fiber pair and up to 650 Gbps data rate per wavelength.