Facebook and Microsoft are taking their quest for faster internet to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The two tech giants have announced that they're planning to start construction on a giant underwater fiber optic cable in August that will span from Virginia Beach to Balboa, Spain — a distance of more than 4,000 miles. The cable is set to be "the highest capacity link across the Atlantic," The Wall Street Journal reports.
In a joint statement Thursday, Microsoft and Facebook said the cable will make bandwidth rates faster and increase reliability of cloud services like Skype, Xbox Live, photo sharing, and live video broadcasting. The cable will handle up to 160 terabytes per second. That's roughly 8.5 million times the average home internet speed in the UK, The Independent reports.
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