A Multinational Project to Build a New Underwater Cable Uniting Latin America and the U.S.

Algar Telecom (Brazil), Angola Cables (Angola), Antel (Uruguay) and Google announced plans to build a new undersea fiber-optic cable connecting the key cities of Santos and Fortaleza in Brazil with Boca Raton, Florida in the United States. TE Connectivity SubCom is the selected provider for the project.

This investment is part of a joint effort to help build the fabric of the Internet to sustain the current needs of Internet users in the Latin American region and to prepare for increased demands in the future. Currently, Latin America has a connected population of almost 300 million people and has become one of the fastest growing regions in the world in terms of Internet penetration. In addition, with the increasing deployment of LTE networks and fiber-optic network access, as well as the offer of high-quality contents (HD/4K) and cloud-based services, there is an ever growing demand for capacity access to data centers and the Internet globally.

The new route will be 10,556 km (6,560 miles) long and have six fiber pairs. According to estimations, it will increase the overall bandwidth of existing subsea cable systems by 64 Tbps (Terabits per second) of capacity. The cable will be built and operated by these four leading companies. The contract comes into effect today and the construction is expected to begin immediately and is planned to be completed by the end of 2016.