MAREA

node · earth · North Atlantic

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.