BILBAO, SPAIN / VIRGINIA BEACH, VIRGINIA — Microsoft, Facebook and Spanish telecommunications giant Telxius have just completed work on a massive continent-to-continent underwater cable. <br /> <br />According to a Microsoft news release, the Marea undersea cable is comprised of eight pairs of fiber optic cables, encircled by copper, a layer of hard-plastic and a waterproof coating. <br /> <br />The subsea cable stretches over 4,000 miles from the U.S. east coast at Virginia Beach, to Spain's north coast at Bilbao. <br /> <br />When laying the cable, engineers had to account for an average depth of 11,000 feet and hazards including coral reefs, earthquake zones and active volcanoes. <br /> <br />The cable can transmit a maximum of 160 terabits per second. That's the equivalent of 71 million streaming high definition videos.
