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INDEXwiredInUSA - March 2014
Undersea to Europe
The Brazilian government is anticipating
that a future undersea fiber optic
telecommunication link with Europe will
increase security and reduce consumers’
internet costs.
Construction of the submarine cable will
begin in July, under a joint venture led
by Brazil's Telebras and Spain's IslaLink
Submarine Cables. The project is expected
to cost $185m.
"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 be as much as
15 percent.
Currently there is one aging and limited
cable connecting Brazil to Europe, Atlantis
II, almost exclusively used as a telephony
link. Four submarine cables connect 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 to carry Internet traffic between South
America and Europe, bypassing the US.
Telebras maintains that the motivation for
the undersea link was economic, with the
added bonus of security, stressing that
the cable project would have been built
regardless of the NSA spying revelations.
MAKING
THENEWS