MAREA

Assembled from 16 blocks · 2 evidence · 8 related

1. Story
2. The transatlantic cable built jointly by Microsoft, Facebook and Telxius and completed in September 2017, running about 6,600 km between Virginia Beach in the United States and Sopelana, near Bilbao, on the Spanish Biscay coast. It carries eight fibre pairs with an initial design capacity given as 160 Tbps — a figure later raised to about 200 Tbps in vendor trials as terminal equipment improved, without touching the cable — and its fibre pairs are divided among the owners, with two pairs each to Microsoft and Facebook and the remainder to Telxius. Three things make it the right modern counterpart to TAT-1 in this Journey. Its owners are not telephone companies but the operators of the services the traffic is for, which is the ownership change of the past decade in one object. Its southern landfall was chosen deliberately to route away from the crowded New York–to–northern-Europe corridor, which is redundancy expressed as geography. And its capacity, on eight pairs of glass in a hose-thick cable, is of an order that makes the 36 circuits of 1956 look like a different kind of object altogether.
3. Knowledge
4. MAREA
5. The shift of cable ownership to content providers
6. Connections
7. TAT-8
8. The shift of cable ownership to content providers
9. MAREA is completed across the Atlantic
10. MAREA
11. 2Africa
12. MAREA is completed across the Atlantic
13. The core of 2Africa is completed
14. Evidence
15. Supports MAREA's landings at Virginia Beach and Sopelana near Bilbao, its length of about 6,600 km, its eight fibre pairs, its initial design capacity of 160 Tbps and the three-party ownership. V55 verification basis: retrieved in summary, not opened. This is a source announcing its own project; the 200 Tbps figure quoted elsewhere in trade coverage is a vendor trial result and is treated in this pack as demonstrated rather than contracted capacity.
16. Supports the scale figures used in this pack: more than 600 active and planned systems and over 1.5 million route-kilometres in service as of early 2026, and the standard statement that submarine cables carry well over 95 per cent of international data traffic. V55 verification basis: retrieved by search, not opened — this session has no working WebFetch to telegeography.com. TeleGeography is a commercial research firm and is the de facto public register for this industry precisely because no public authority maintains one; the figures should be read as its counts on its own definitions, and they move every year.