New High-Powered Submarine Cable Will Interconnect Eleven Countries

French networking giant Alcatel-Lucent has secured a deal with America Movil to construct a 17,500-kilometer-long (10,875-mile-long) submarine cable system, connecting six Latin American countries with the United States.

This is the first system of its kind to send 100-gigabit-per-second transmissions, according to Alcatel’s press release.

Once built, the cable line will be the ‘information superhighway’ between the United States, Colombia, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Guatemala.

Nicknamed América Móvil, the project will boost international connectivity for all of America Movil’s subsidiaries  enabling them to offer high-speed internet service to subscribers in their respective area of operation.

The cable system will connect seven countries with eleven landing points: Miami and Jacksonville (United States), Barranquilla and Cartagena (Colombia), Fortaleza, Salvador & Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), Puerto Plata (Dominican Republic), Cancun (Mexico), San Juan (Puerto Rico) and Puerto Barrios (Guatemala).

“Cable route and landing surveys are complete and manufacturing of cable and repeaters is well underway,” the French company stated.

The system will be operational sometime in the second half of this year. America Movil is the biggest telecom carrier in the region, serving 256 million wireless subscribers and 62 million fixed lines.

More than anything else, the cable system will lay the groundwork for stimulating IT-related services across the region.

“100G technology is playing a fundamental role in scalability as operators are seeking to manage their bandwidth expansion to meet increasing demands for content-rich services and to address new applications such as data center interconnection needs,” said Philippe Dumont, President of Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks.

Under the deal, Alcatel-Lucent will build the system, operate and maintain. The French networking giant is already maintaining over 100,000 km of critical submarine cable infrastructure in the Atlantic Ocean.