EllaLink has announced that it has completed the deployment of the transatlantic submarine cable linking Latin America to Europe. The network, which directly links Brazil and Portugal, will connect the main hubs of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Fortaleza to Lisbon, Madrid and Marseille.
The maritime cable has the lowest latency in the industry and will support traffic in excess of 100 Tbps over four direct fiber pairs between Brazil and Portugal. The network also has 30 Tbps connections between Portugal and Madeira, and another additional 40 Tbps route between Portugal and Morocco in the future. The starting cities will be Fortaleza, in Ceará, and Sines, in Portugal. The launch should start in the next quarter and guarantee data traffic of more than 100 Tbps between Latin America and Europe.
After this first phase, EllaLink’s expansion plans will then be Madeira, Cape Verde, Mauritania, Morocco, Guyana and the Canary Islands. This digital sovereignty program launched by Dilma Rousseff, which follows on from a long-standing concern of the Brazilian state, will see the light of day towards the end of June when the EllaLink fiber optic cable will be operational.
In Cape Verde it was moored, in Praia do Portinho, in the capital, during the cable mooring process on Thursday and, will connect Sines to Portugal, to Latin America, passing, in a first phase, through Funchal ( Sao Tiago) in Madeira. 6,000 km long EllaLink is a latest generation optical fiber submarine cable, designed to meet the demand for traffic between Europe and Latin America, with the possibility of including traffic from the ECOWAS region, from Cape Verde. It is a budget of US $ 30 million which has been dedicated to it in this country, financed by the European Investment Bank (EIB), to the tune of US $ 25 million.
EllaLink’s cable, which connects Europe to South America, North Africa, Madeira, Cape Verde and the Canary Islands, will, according to the company, provide access to “ an unprecedented level of international connectivity “. This project remains ” one of the big bets of the Portuguese Presidency of the European Union and of the Brazil, ”recalls EllaLink. From Portugal, which plays the role of ” Gateway to Europe “, This cable will establish terrestrial links with the data centers of Lisbon, Madrid and Marseille while on the other side of the Atlantic, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Fortaleza are the cities that are part of this” network ” Firstly. According to EllaLink, one of the advantages of this cable will be to reduce latencies in communications (the company talks about 50% less) between the countries that are part of the project. As an example, the case of Portugal and Brazil is cited, where the delay will be “less than sixty milliseconds”. Ellalink, has the “highest” characteristics in terms of technology, “of all that exists”, in terms of underwater telecommunications. This cable consists of four pairs of fibers, each with a capacity of 12 terabytes.
The project started in 2015, when the Brazilian “Telebras” and the Spanish IslaLink created a joint venture to implement the new submarine cable. Initially, it was only a 150 million euro transaction but it has grown along the way. Indeed, Telebras ended up abandoning the project, running up against the annual finance law and not having the necessary money to honor the promise. In 2017 Alcatel Submarine Networks was hired to build the system and the following year Marguerite became EllaLink’s equity sponsor. The main customers of the system are, among others, the Bella consortium, Cabo Verde Telecom and EMACOM. Subsequently, the network will be connected to the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East