How Facebook and Microsoft Undersea Fiber will connect Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East

Access and usage of the Internet is growing rapidly. Fueling this growth is Social Media and Cloud Computing.

So it should come as no surprise that Facebook and Microsoft would take it up on themselves to lay their own Fiber Optic Cable as reported in the article “Facebook and Microsoft to Build Fiber Optic Cable Across Atlantic”, published May 27th 2016 by Drew Fitzgerald, The Wall Street Journal.

The undersea fiber optic cable is called “MAREA” after the Spanish word for “tide”. It’s slated to begin construction in August 2016 and it's being laid by Telxius, the infrastructure company owned by global communications giant Telefónica. When the 4,100 miles Fiber optic cable, which stretches from Virginia Beach, Virginia to Bilbao, Spain is completed, it will provide Facebook and Microsoft with some additional 160 Tbps of bandwidth. 

This translates to faster cloud computing af the two partners race towards a completion date of October 2017 as reported in “Facebook and Microsoft team up to lay a massive internet cable across the Atlantic”, published May 26, 2016 By Nick Statt, The Verge.

More importantly, it'll also position them to serve their increasing customer base in the following countries:

1.      Europe

2.      Africa

3.      The Middle East

4.      Asia

So why are companies that traditionally do Tech now dabbleing in Telecoms?

Facebook and Microsoft Undersea Fiber Optic Cable – Google’s cable to help with increasing Traffic

Google had already completed the interconnection of their own 9,000-kilometer FASTER undersea fiber optic in June 2015 as reported in the article “Google's 60Tbps Pacific cable welcomed in Japan”, published June 23, 2015 By Tim Hornyak, PC World.

With a bandwidth of 60 Tbps, their cable stretches from Shima, Mie Prefecture, east of Osaka to Oregon on the Western coast of USA and has the support of telecom carriers KDDI of Japan, SingTel of Singapore, Global Transit of Malaysia, China Mobile International and China Telecom Global.

This isn't surprising; the amount of Data that these Telecom Providers process and transmit necessitates that they have to have their own Telecom Infrastructure instead of leasing Infrastructure from Telecom Providers as noted in “Facebook and Microsoft are laying a giant cable across the Atlantic”, published 05.26.16 by cade Metz, Wired.

By taking up the role of the traditional Telecoms, Facebook is ensuring that they have the bandwidth to serve their 1.65 billion users and Microsoft the bandwidth to manage their Azure, Bing, Xbox Live and Office 365 programs.

In the process, they'll be able to offload some of the traffic from the traditional telcos and expand Internet access to countries such as Africa, Asia and the Middle East where Internet censorship makes using their service difficult.