 to JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Jamie Skado-Kutaya, here on the floor of Telecom Exchange NYC in 2016. Joining me here today is my friend, Frank Ray. He is the director of Global Network Acquisition Group over at Microsoft. Frank, thanks for joining us here on JSA TV. Yes, thank you for having me, appreciate it. So, the industry is buzzing. Big news that you guys launched recently that Microsoft and Facebook have joined together to lay Marea. Now, Marea is state-of-the-art subsea cable across the Atlantic Ocean, connecting Europe, US. Can you tell us more about this built? Yes, so I mean, we're very excited with what we've accomplished with Marea. At the technical level, it's an eight fiber pair system and the landing points and the routing of the cable are completely diverse from all other landings and cables today. The design system has been designed with a capacity of 160 terabit per second or the equivalent of sending 10,000 high-definition Blu-ray DVDs across the Atlantic in one second. Wow. And also from day one, we've designed the system to be a fully open cable, meaning that we're not limited to use the optical hardware from the cable manufacturer. And this provides us a tremendous amount of flexibility to grow the system and grow the capacity at the same pace of optical hardware innovation while also improving overall economics. And so all of this is meant to improve the availability and resiliency of not only Microsoft's cloud, but also of the global internet as a whole. But also in what we're very excited about is this is the first project of its kind for Microsoft and its history. And more importantly, it illustrates the commitment that Microsoft has to build out a first class global cloud infrastructure to the benefit of our customers and their mission critical data. And talking about speed of the network, there's also speed of the project timeline. This news kind of came out of the blue for us. Oftentimes, we have long lead times to get news like this out. But is Mireya going to commence around August 2016? What's the timeline for you? Right. So the build of the cable itself is going to happen in August. Typically a project of this nature, the manufacturing and build times are not that long, usually around 14 to 18 months. But more importantly, what we've seen in the telecommunications industry over the last 10 years is that the timeline to build out large scale infrastructure projects of this kind has been getting longer and longer, several years in many cases, if at all, while the product development cycles and time to market in today's digital economy continue to get faster and faster. And it's this dichotomy that we're trying to address. And so we've been able to go from project start, excuse me, to contract execution in a fraction of the time of similar cables in recent years. And I think that's something that between this being the first cloud company funded system, as well as a fully open cable design, we're very happy with what we've been able to accomplish. And let's talk about this highest capacity subsea cable. What key target markets is this capacity going to be serving? So at the macro level, we're addressing the traffic flow between North America and Europe, obviously. But more specifically, we're trying to focus on the high volume data flows between Data Center Alley in Northern Virginia and the major Western European markets, all while bypassing the current junction points in the global internet infrastructure today, such as London and New York specifically. So you're going from Virginia to Spain? So we're going from Virginia to Bilbao, Spain. And we're very excited about the options that Bilbao, Spain offers as a landing point. So not only do we bypass those junction points, which reduces the impact of any single event has on either side of the Atlantic, think Hurricane Sandy, as you mentioned in your keynote, but also via Bilbao, we can access Southern Europe and also bypassing the junction points in Europe to reach markets such as Africa, the Middle East, India and Asia pack. Diversity is the word of the day for sure. Okay, so also breaking news for you, you've acquired LinkedIn. So tell us, how does LinkedIn tie into your ability to provide the best user experience that you're of course known for? Well, I mean, we're still looking to close the deal. So I can only say so much, but I think if you look at, you know, 433 million users and growing auto play feature in their newsfeed for video, you know, getting those bits as close as possible to the end user, making sure that things load instantly. You think about the online training that they offer as well. And if you add that into what we're doing with Office 365 and in our Azure suite, I think they have a lot of the similar issues and they experienced a lot of the similar issues and have the same types of infrastructure requirements that we have. So we're excited, not just what we see as synergies on the product side, but also synergies at the actual infrastructure side. Well, we're excited to watch you break all this news. I gotta tell you, it's never a dull moment. And so, not sure if you can answer this, but if we were to give you a crystal ball and you were to look inside of it, what do you see from Microsoft in the next 12 months? So, well, you know, moving from a box software provider to an online service provider means that we need to have a new approach, new thinking, new models, building out something of this scale and this scope. You know, we can't do things the way that we've been doing them in the past. So we are always gonna continue to look for areas that we can improve not only our own cloud infrastructure, but the global internet infrastructure, as well as connectivity options for our end users. And anything that we see as this is an opportunity, that's where we're likely going to invest. Well, big news. Always a pleasure, Frank, to have you. Thank you very much. Thank you for joining us and thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV.