Facebook Inc (FB) and Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) recently announced a joint venture to build an underwater fiber optic cable across the Atlantic Ocean.
To put the relevance of this new venture into context, I want to take you back a few hundred years.
Queen Victoria sent the following telegram to President James Buchanan on August 16, 1858, as the first communique over the newly laid submarine trans-Atlantic cable:
“Europe and America are united by telegraphy. Glory to God in the highest; on earth, peace and good will toward men.”
The cable was shaky and correspondence took hours, but it was a major step forward in connecting the people of the world. And while the leaders of the two nations of the world grabbed the headlines, it was all made possible by the private sector.
No longer do we use telegraphs to communicate, but the concept remains the same today. Worlds are connected through data and the cloud, and while the hottest news in communication right now is drones, which I suppose are still the future of wireless, there’s clearly nothing like the steadiness of cable buried miles under the ocean’s surface.
The New Alliance: FB and MSFT
Back to the FB-MSFT deal. Facebook and Microsoft will use a 4,000-mile long cable (known as MAREA, which is Spanish for “tide”) to connect Virginia and Spain. It will carry as much as 160 terabits of data per second across what will be the highest-capacity cable running this route. It is the first cable to connect the United States with Southern Europe.
Construction will begin in August, and the cable is expected to be completed by October 2017. From there, it will be operated by Spanish telecom company Telefonica’s telecoms infrastructure unit Telxius.
By building the cable, FB and MSFT are taking data center costs into their own hands. They’ll no longer have to rely on outside telecom companies for bandwidth. Instead, the cable will help lower costs, accelerate bandwidth rates and accommodate the increasing amounts of data used around the world.
While the news may sound groundbreaking (so to speak), FB and MSFT are actually a bit late to the game. There are already many submarine lines that connect the various countries, and Alphabet Inc (GOOG, GOOGL) built a trans-Pacific cable all the way back in 2010. In fact, GOOGL is now in the process of finishing a second trans-Pacific cable as well as an Atlantic line that connects the U.S. and Brazil.
And this isn’t Microsoft’s first time diving into the ocean either. This is the company’s third public investment in a trans-Atlantic cable. Plus, its Project Natick unit had already been experimenting with renewable-marine-energy-source-powered underwater data centers, which are expected to help reduce costs associated with cooling data centers that generate a lot of excess heat.
Financial details of the new joint venture have not been disclosed, but this is an interesting step for tech companies to accommodate the increasing data use around the world. And it’s also interesting to see that they’re using a method that’s been around for a lifetime. Mostly, though, I like that the private sector is once again leading the charge.
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Editor’s Note: The original statement that Alphabet Inc was the “first” to build a trans-Pacific cable has been corrected to clarify that it made such a cable before Microsoft and Facebook. We apologize for any confusion caused by the error.
