The route to implement the Chilean Transoceanic Cable will be through New Zealand and to Australia. This was said by the Government of Chile through its Ministry of Transport and Telecommunications (MTT). In this way, this digital initiative will allow the country to connect with Oceania, accessing data from Asia.
Based on the results of the Feasibility Study, the Chilean government chose this route. The cable will go from Continental Chile to Auckland and Sydney. One of the main points of the study was the projection of traffic between both continents for the next 20 years.
5G will level up the connection between Chile and Asia
The study considered it as the main driver of the model the disruptive demand that will be generated both in users and in different industries from solutions that will be developed based on 5G technology such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and Intelligence Artificial (AI).
Subsequently, and based on the above, the business cases of the different routes under evaluation were obtained, where different components were considered, such as customer segment, product mix, price curve, value proposition, relationship with customers, costs and financial resources, finally determining that this route is the most recommended to deploy. This, since the route through Auckland and up to Sydney is the most profitable option, since it considers fewer kilometers of fiber optics and because Australia is the Digital Hub of Oceania (it has more than 12 interconnection cables with the rest of the world) and an Emerging Hub in Asia, currently maintaining excellent connectivity with it.
In this sense, the business model considers that arriving with the cable to Sydney, it can later be mounted on existing systems. In fact, in Australia today there are five cables in operation that have the capacity to reach Asia. In addition, there are two cables in the deployment plan.
“We are taking a big step in defining the route that our Transoceanic Cable project will have. This is the first initiative that will allow the region to connect with Oceania and finally with Asia, opening enormous opportunities for Chile to become the Digital Hub of South America on the Pacific side, becoming an attraction for different investments such as data centers and those related to digital commerce, ”said the Minister of Transport and Telecommunications, Gloria Hutt.
For her part, the Undersecretary of Telecommunications, Pamela Gidi, indicated that “this project considers a route of approximately 13,180 kilometers to Australia, also contemplating a connection through New Zealand, countries that have a large and developed telecommunications market with an important deployment of digital infrastructure. Along these lines, I would like to highlight that Sydney is a great digital access point to the Asian continent, and all the financial indicators in our studies indicated this route as the most convenient one ”.
Undersecretary Gidi added that “in parallel, the country is holding conversations with different actors in the region who are interested in joining this initiative that will have a great impact in South America.”
In this way, with the selection of the route, the project begins its third and final stage of analysis, which considers the engineering study of the selected route, which will provide detailed information on costs and characteristics of the maritime route. This information will be the first input for the next tender for the construction of the Transoceanic Cable.
Additionally, with this announcement the most relevant stage of the process of raising the financing of this infrastructure begins, which includes the delivery of the business case of the selected route to all the organizations that have shown interest at an international level where banks are listed. foreigners, multilateral banks and investment funds so that they can carry out their own analysis and finally decide how to participate in the project.
Finally, it should be noted that once the most profitable route has been selected, the Government of Chile, through the public company Desarrollo País, which generates investment in projects with private profitability, is also in the process of analysis to determine the contribution of Chile in the future public-private consortium that will be in charge of financing the infrastructure.