14 DAY TRIAL // Google has decided to give a helping hand towards improving the Internet infrastructure in Latin America by constructing a massive undersea fiber optic cable to link Brazil to the United States.
The new cable would cover 10,556 km (or 6,560 miles) and it will link Brazilian cities Santos and Fortaleza with Boca Raton in Florida. According to the plans, there will be six fiber pairs and the overall system design capacity will be of 64 Tbps, reports Brazilian newspaper Valor.
The company wants to invest some $60 million (€47.5 million) in the project and it has to be completed by late 2016.
“As more people get access to the Internet, more capacity to the infrastructure that keeps the Internet running is needed, so that everyone can have a fast, safe and useful online experience,” said Cristian Ramos, Google’s chief of Latin America.
Google isn’t running into this project on its own. Other partner companies participating are Antel, the Uruguay government-owned telco, Angola Cables, an African operator, and Algar Telecom from Brazil. TE Connectivity SubCom won the construction contract for the project.
Brazil – Europe cable project underway
Brazil is also getting an undersea cable to link it to the European Union, which president Dilma Rousseff insisted on early this year. She had been adamant that Brazil’s data should bypass the United States following the NSA scandal in which she herself was exposed as one of the agency’s surveillance targets.
Rousseff later addressed the European Union during a conference, pressuring them to agree to the project. This is, of course, the better alternative to creating a closed off Internet network for Brazil only. This would have forced companies desiring to operate within the country to store data locally and to avoid transferring any of it to its data centers in the United States, as per usual.
The plan isn’t exactly new. In fact, it dates back a few years during which time there were not enough companies to back up such a costly project. The NSA scandal, however, has pushed companies into action and forced them to dig deep into their own pockets.
The Internet cable linking Fortaleza in Brazil to Portugal will cost a whopping $185 million (€146.5 million) and could be completed roughly in the same timeframe as the one Google is helping build. It would, however, provide Brazilians with a little bit more comfort knowing that at least part of the data won’t be moving through the United States.