The deployment of two subsea networks in the last month is improving the communication of South America with North America and Europe.
According to the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS), subsea networks cables allow $10 billion by day in global trade. For that reason, the deployment of a complex subsea network in South America is key. In the last month, South America improved their communications between Europe and North America with two new subsea cables.
Google announced the project Firmina, the last generation subsea cable that will improve the connectivity of Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina with the East Coast of the United States. Meanwhile, a new subsea cable started working in the Atlantic Ocean, connecting Brazilian city Fortaleza con Sines with Europe and Africa.
Firmina: Google connect North with South in America
Google announced its plans to roll out a new submarine cable. The cable will connect the east coast of the United States with Las Toninas, Argentina, with connections in Brazil and Uruguay. The goal of the tech giant is to provide users in South America with a connection with lower latency to Google services, including its cloud services. The cable will be designed by SubCom and is expected to be ready by the end of 2023.
Currently, the closest Google data center in the region and the only one in South America is located in Santiago de Chile. This data center is connected to the West Coast of the United States through the cable called Curie.
The Firmina cable owes its name to Maria Firmina dos Reis, a Brazilian educator and abolitionist. This new cable joins other submarine cable investments in the region made by Google. The Tannat cable, a collaborative company between Antel Uruguay and Google, currently connects to the same locations, while the Monnet cable connects Brazil with the United States. Google’s Junior cable connects various parts of the country.
From Brazil to Europe
A new submarine cable that connects Brazil with Europe began operation this month. This will allow high-quality access to telecommunications services and applications and prevent data from passing through the United States, the state-run Brazil Agency reported today. The six thousand kilometers long submarine cable connects the Brazilian city of Fortaleza with Sines, passing through French Guyana, the Portuguese island of Madeira, the Spanish Canary Islands, and Cape Verde. The project was financed by the European Commission, with 25 million euros, the Brazilian government, with 8.9 million euros, and the company Ella Link, with 150 million euros.
The new cable will prevent data from passing through the United States and allow a high-speed direct connection that reduces latency by 50 percent, that is, the amount of time it takes for a data packet to go from one point to another. other. The infrastructure will be used for the next 25 years for cloud computing services and digital businesses, as well as science, technology and education activities. “Now we saw during the pandemic the importance of working together to defeat this common enemy that is covid-19. It is through science that we have the condition to win, and for science to work, we need the information exchange operation” Pontes explained during the ceremony.
Greater capacity in South America
Submarine cables are powered by fiber optics and pulses of light that carry data end-to-end. The light signal is amplified every 100 km with an electric current provided by ground stations that are in each country. Shorter cables can count on this energy. However, in the case of longer fiber optic cables, it becomes very difficult to feed the signal with the energy that is needed.
Firmina will innovate with a new feature. The cable consists of 12 pairs of fiber optics with a system that allows the cable to have a single power source. Firmina cable will receive a voltage 20% higher than other telecommunications cables.
Cloud services, growing business in Latin America
Since 2019 Oracle predicted an increase in cloud services in Latin America due to the growth of the fintech sector and in services that are increasingly easy to adopt, while estimates from Frost & Sullivan foresee an annual growth of 31% in the Latin American market in this sector.
Last investment in subsea cables responds to this market growth, in which other competitors have already positioned themselves, such as Huawei, which has invested heavily in South America, such as the public data center in Chile. Meanwhile, Oracle has expanded its data centers in Brazil in recent years.
However, the geographic location of South America makes it difficult to establish reliable connections in the region, so it is expected that we will see more projects like these in the coming years.