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Geekwire reports on a post on Microsoft's corporate blog in which plans for a transatlantic communications cable are announced. The cable will connect Bilbao in Spain to Virginia Beach, Virginia in the USA. Construction is set to begin in August. The planned capacity of 160 Tbps would, according to the blog post, exceed that of any existing transatlantic cable. The project is to be a joint venture of Microsoft with Facebook, and is to be operated by the Telxius arm of Telefónica.
From the Geekwire article:
Microsoft and Facebook will place a cutting-edge undersea cable across the Atlantic Ocean, stretching 6,600 kilometers or more than 4,100 miles from Virginia Beach, Va., to Bilbao, Spain, capable of hurtling data under the ocean at speeds of 160 Terabits per second.
The companies say the new project, called Marea, will be the highest-capacity subsea cable ever placed across the Atlantic, the first to connect the U.S. to southern Europe. Construction will begin in August 2016, with completion scheduled for October 2017, the companies say.
"We're seeing an ever-increasing customer demand for high speed, reliable connections for Microsoft cloud services, including Bing, Office 365, Skype, Xbox Live, and Microsoft Azure," said Microsoft's Frank Rey in a post announcing the plan.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 28 2016, @01:33AM
The charitable answer is that many companies, including FB (and likely MS) have North Carolina data centers. After NYC, Charlotte NC is the second financial capital of America, and finance is data-intensive and wants nearby data centers to lower latency. Research Triangle is also there. VAB is just north of NC.
The less charitable answer is that most of southeastern VA is a massive military and intelligence base with a few civilians living there to make it look like it has cities. The CIA have training grounds just north (Camp Peary) and south (Hertford Point), NATO headquarters for this side of the Atlantic is in Norfolk which is also the largest naval base in the world ever, NASA and the Air Force have a presence (Langley), etc. If you wanted to siphon up EU datacenter data and ship it to the US to be inspected by pretty much any part of the military/industrial complex, southeastern VA would have a some office staffed by the interested agency/company. Great place to build a collaborative work center for inspecting Windows Telemetry data or Azure server data or Office data or FB chat data or whatever you want from Europe, especially if EU data laws mean that it's all being stored over there (and thus needs to be hopped over to the US quickly for inspection).
A third possibility: because Tata (yes, everyone's favorite outsource/H1B mill) operates the other cable running into Bilbao, Tata TGN-Western Europe, which goes directly to the UK. Maybe FB/MS got yet another really good deal going with Tata?