Narayan AmmachchiA consortium comprised of Google Inc. and three telecom operators has announced plans to construct a fiber-optic cable network linking Brazil with the United States, Africa and Uruguay.
Reports say the project will enhance Google ‘s control over Internet provision across the Americas, where it heavily dominates the search engine market.
At a press conference in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo, the consortium stated that the new submarine cable will be ready by the end of 2016 and that it will expand the bandwidth of existing cable systems by 64 terabytes per second.
Brazil’s Algar Telecom, Uruguayan carrier Antel and African cable operator Angola Cables are the telecom firms involved in the project.
The first leg of the project will see Algar Telecom and Google roll out submarine cables connecting the Brazilian cities of Santos and Fortaleza to Boca Raton, Florida.
Antel will then start building an undersea cable to connect Brazil with Uruguay, while Angola Cables will roll out cables to link Angola with Brazil’s Fortaleza, where it will also operate a data center.
The cable network, estimated to be about 10,000 kilometers (about 6,560 miles) in length, will cost the consortium more than US$500 million.
This is the second international cable network Google will have taken part in after the construction of trans-Pacific submarine cable network that linked Japan with the United States in 2010. Internet firms like Google are showing increasing interest in building broadband infrastructure as it enables them to control all aspects of Internet access.
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