MAREA

MAREA is a 6,605 km (4,104 miles) long transatlantic communications cable connecting the United States with Spain. Owned and funded by Microsoft and Meta Platforms, but constructed and operated by Telxius, a subsidiary of the Spanish telecom company Telefónica, it is the "highest-capacity submarine cable in the world" with a system design capacity of 200 terabits per second as of 2019. History In May 2016, Microsoft, Facebook (Now Meta Platforms), and Telxius announced the MAREA project, saying that it would provide the Eastern United States, most of whose internet traffic flows through New York, with "a more efficient path not only to Europe but to Africa, the Middle East, and even Asia". According to Microsoft's Director of Global Network Strategy for Cloud Infrastructure and Operations, one impetus for the project was sparked by the service disruptions caused by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012. Construction began shortly afterwards, in August 2016, and was completed in September 2017, connecting Virginia Beach, Virginia, in the United States, with Sopelana, a town near Bilbao, Spain. It began operations in February 2018. In January 2019, Telxius announced that AWS had signed an IRU agreement to use one of MAREA's eight fiber pairs (Microsoft and Facebook each own two pairs, and Telxius will have three pairs for other customers and its own use.