Telxius, Facebook and Microsoft, together with the local and regional authorities from Biscay and the Basque Country, witnessed the landing of the submarine cable MAREA in Sopelana, Spain. This is an important milestone for the highest capacity submarine cable when it starts its trip across the Atlantic.

Microsoft and Facebook designed MAREA to be interoperable with a variety of networking equipment. This new “open” design brings significant benefits for customers: lower costs and easier equipment upgrades which leads to faster growth in bandwidth rates since the system can evolve at the pace of optical technology innovation. Through Telxius, Telefónica brings longstanding experience in subsea cables to this new system. Telxius will serve as the operator of the system and sell capacity as part of their wholesale infrastructure business.

• The new transatlantic, subsea cable system will be 6,600 km.
• It will run between Virginia Beach (US) and Sopelana/Bilbao, Vizcaya, Spain.
• It is the first new cable system built south of the North Atlantic since 1999.
• It links southern Europe a data center concentration in the US, located in the North Virginia corridor.
• It is the first transatlantic cable landing in Virginia Beach and Sopelana/Bilbao, Vizcaya, Spain.
• The Sopelana landing is connected to an existing fiber network corridor in Europe linking major hubs like Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, London.
• It is the highest-capacity transatlantic cable ever built with 8 fiber pairs and initial estimated design capacity of 160T Tbps.
• The tendering of the cable kicks off here in Sopelana where the works begin.
• It has taken three weeks from the cable factory in the US to get to the European maintenance hub (Calais) and Sopelana.
• Works in Sopelana will take a few days for anchoring operation prior to proceeding to start the landing across the Atlantic.
• Estimated construction completion in Autumn 2017.