Argentina is in the subsea cable news again. Late last week wholesale telecom service provider GlobeNet’s new subsea cable system Malbec, which connects Argentina and Brazil, was launched.
According to the Capacity Media website, the project started in 2018. It is now the first new route to provide direct connectivity from Argentina to Brazil, since 2001 and more than doubles the capacity that is currently available.
Two landing stations, in Praia Grande, Brazil, and Las Toninas, Argentina, have been deployed and a number of customers activated on a system that has reportedly been designed to deliver 100G and 400G of capacity across the entire route. It also boasts resiliency and low latency.
Alcatel Submarine Networks supplied the trunk cable between Rio de Janeiro and Las Toninas, which consists of six fibre pairs; the branch to Praia Grande is made up of eight fibre pairs.
According to Philippe Perrier, CTO at GlobeNet, the network has the flexibility to select the submarine line terminal equipment from “any suitable suppliers”. The system also features spatial division multiplexing (SDM) technology “that maximizes the capacity of the entire cable, rather than the capacity per fibre pair”.
But this is not the only significant recent news story relating to Argentina and cable. In April we reported that neutral telecommunications infrastructure operator Telxius had announced plans to provide diverse subsea capacity between Brazil and Argentina through a new submarine cable called Tannat connecting Santos (Brazil) with Las Toninas (Argentina). It’s now open for business.
More recently, Google has announced plans to build Firmina, an open subsea cable that will run from the East Coast of the United States to Las Toninas, Argentina, with additional landings in Praia Grande, Brazil and Punta del Este, Uruguay.
