High Expectations for Brazil Undersea Cable to Europe

The Brazilian government expects that its future undersea fiber optic telecommunication link with Europe will result in a reduction in Internet costs to final consumers as well as increased security.

A Brazil-Europe submarine cable will be built under a joint venture led by Brazil's state-owned telecom provider Telebras and Spain's IslaLink Submarine Cables at a cost of $185 million and will begin in July.

"This new submarine cable provides a direct connection to the European continent, decreasing latency. It is expected that this will result in cost reductions," the coordinator of the submarine cabling project at Telebras, Ronald Valladão, told Deutsche Welle Brazil, adding that the savings to consumers could reach as much as 15 percent.

There is currently one cable connecting Brazil to Europe, Atlantis II, which is old and has limited capacity, being almost exclusively used as a telephony link.  The country has four other submarine cables, each connecting Brazil to the United States.

The new cable will link Portugal to the city of Fortaleza in the northeast of Brazil. The project was announced following reports that the National Security Agency in the United States had been spying on Brazil's telecommunications - the plan is to build links that would funnel internet traffic between South America and Europe, bypassing the US entirely.

Telebras maintains that the motivation for building the undersea link is economic - with the added bonus of security - but stresses that the cable project would have gone ahead regardless of the revelations regarding the NSA spying revelations.


source wireworld