European Commission to lay submarine cable between Brazil and Portugal
The European Commission has announced that a contract has now entered into force to start work on the construction of a submarine cable between Brazil and Portugal.
The European Commission reports that the cable should be ready for use sometime in 2020. Construction will start sometime early this year, according to Bella, a key participant in the project. That process begins with a survey of the ocean floor to determine the exact cable route. Then the cable system is made. The first data packets are expected to go through the cable by the end of 2020.
The cable goes into the sea in the Portuguese coastal town of Sines and then resurfaces in Fortaleza, Brazil. Along the way, the cable will also surface in Cape Verde, the Canary Islands and Madeira. French Guiana is also connected by the cable. The cable, also known as EllaLink, connects data centers in Madrid, Lisbon, Marseille, Fortaleza and São Paulo.
According to the EU, the new cable and the increasing capacity are needed to support companies and scientific and cultural projects. The Commission hopes that the cable will contribute to business and that South American and European companies will further develop their data economy and cooperate more, for example in the field of IoT and high performance computing. In the field of science, for example, the cable could contribute to the faster exchange of astronomical data, benefiting the European Southern Observatory in Chile, and several new observatories in Chile and Europe.
The new cable consists of four fiber optic pairs, each pair having a capacity of 18Tbit/s. The EllaLink cable is designed to last 25 years and will be 9300km long. Currently, only the Atlantis 2 cable, which was laid in 2000, runs between Europe and South America. This is largely used for telephony services, which means that the data capacity is limited.
EllaLink is also the name of a private consortium responsible for the construction and installation of the cable. Bella is an important participant in the project; this consortium is an international collaboration of research and education networks, of which the European Commission is the main investor. The EU is contributing €26.5 million to the project and South American members of the participating consortium are contributing a total of €27.2 million.