MAREA


MAREA is a 6,600 km long transatlantic communications cable connecting the United States with Spain. Owned and funded by Microsoft and Facebook, but constructed and operated by Telxius, a subsidiary of the Spanish telecom company Telefónica, it is the "highest-capacity submarine cable in the world" with a system design capacity of 200 terabits per second.

History

In May 2016, Microsoft, Facebook, and Telxius announced the MAREA project, saying that it would provide the Eastern United States, most of whose internet traffic flows through New York, with "a more efficient path not only to Europe but to Africa, the Middle East, and even Asia". According to Microsoft's Director of Global Network Strategy for Cloud Infrastructure and Operations, one impetus for the project was sparked by the service disruptions caused by Hurricane Sandy in October.
Construction began shortly afterwards, in August 2016, and was completed in September 2017, connecting Virginia Beach, Virginia, in the United States, with Sopelana, a town near Bilbao, Spain. It began operations in February 2018.
In January 2019, Telxius announced that AWS had signed an IRU agreement to use one of MAREA's eight fiber pairs (Microsoft and Facebook each own two pairs, and Telxius will have three pairs for other customers and its own use.

Operation

was responsible for the construction and operation of the cable, which connects Virginia Beach, Virginia, in the United States, with Sopelana, Spain.
The cable was initially expected to have a transmission speed of 160 terabits per second.. But in 2019, a research team reported they had generated signaling speeds of 26.2 Tbit/s on MAREA cable, 20 percent higher than believed feasible when the cable was designed.
The cable weighs approximately 4.65 million kilograms, and is composed of eight pairs of fiber-optic cable bundles about the size of a garden hose.
The term "marea" means "tide" in Spanish.