Telefónica Group’s telecommunications infrastructure company, which manages an international network of 87,000km of high capacity fibre-optic subsea cables, announced over the weekend that AWS had signed an IRU agreement for the use of a fibre pair on MAREA.
“We have developed a deep relationship with Amazon Web Services across the geographies we serve and are excited by their long-term commitment with the MAREA submarine system,” said Rafael Arranz, chief operating officer of cable business at Telxius (pictured).
“As the market pioneer and leader in cloud IaaS for over 10 years, it’s encouraging to see AWS active in the subsea cable market. Cloud providers increased activity in the cable business is now a major driver of the submarine telecom industry.”
Arranz recently told Capacity that the company’s 2019 strategic priorities are being “committed to increasing connectivity and reliability of communications both in Latin America and Europe, and we aim to continue expanding our network and the availability of IP, capacity, security and colocation services”.
The 6,600km MAREA cable provides the lowest latency route between the US and Southern Europe, as well as a diverse path, further south than other transatlantic cables, to network hubs in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
Telxius opened MAREA for business in April 2018. With an initial system design capacity of 160Tbps, it has reached 200Tbps in only six months thanks to its open and innovative design. The AWS agreement comes after trials on the MAREA cable between Virginia Beach and Bilbao have shown that transmission rates of 6.41bps/Hz can push speeds to 400Gbps.
In 2017, MAREA was the first subsea cable to land in Virginia Beach, US, also a landing point for Telxius’ latest submarine project, the 11,000km BRUSA, connecting to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
