V.tal unveils near-term plan for new LatAm submarine cables

Brazilian digital and telecom infrastructure firm V.tal plans to launch submarine cables for new routes and markets in Latin America in the near term to strengthen and complement its international connectivity operation.

“Our roadmap includes planning expansions and new cables in the medium and short term,” said subsea engineering manager João Januário at a subsea cable event on Wednesday, which was hosted by Brazilian internet service management entity NIC.br.

“We have been looking closely at new markets for some time to expand our submarine cable network. We have some advanced projects, and we should announce them to the market in coming months,” he said.

NIC.br is a non-profit association created in 2005 by the members of Brazil's internet steering committee (CGI) to manage the registration of domain names, allocation of IP addresses, and other functions.

Januário did not provide details about the potential routes and markets, but said decisions will be based on factors such as market demand, local data traffic ecosystems, the ease of connection to terrestrial routes and backbones, and the presence of datacenters.

V.tal is owned by funds linked to Brazilian investment bank BTG Pactual.

In 2022, V.tal and submarine cable company GlobeNet, which is also controlled by BTG, completed the merger of their operations. With this, GlobeNet became part of V.tal.

ROUTES

At present, the group reports 26,000km of submarine cables and over 400,000km of terrestrial fiber optics, the latter mostly in Brazil and inherited from local telco Oi. 

Supplied by ASN, formerly Alcatel-Lucent Submarine networks and just bought from Nokia by the French government, GlobeNet's ring-shaped subsea cabling went live in 2001. 

The system has seven landing points: in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro and Fortaleza), Venezuela (Maiquetia), Colombia (Barranquilla), the US (Boca Raton and Tuckerton), and Bermuda (St. Davis).

V.tal has datacenters in Fortaleza, Rio de Janeiro and Barranquilla.

The company is investing 250 million reais (US$45.2mn) in a new site in Porto Alegre, its first in Brazil’s south. 

The plan is for the datacenter to go live by the end of this year.

The capital of Rio Grande do Sul state is home to other datacenters, has good terrestrial infrastructure, a sizeable market, and off its coast a number of inactive branching units – equipment on seabeds to split submarine cables and create new routes.

In addition to the GlobeNet system, V.tal also has the Malbec submarine cable, which connects Praia Grande/Santos in São Paulo state with Las Toninas in Argentina.

Through partnerships with the Tannat and Junior cables, V.tal has redundancy for Malbec in case of problems on the Praia Grande-Las Toninas route (via Tannat), in addition to also arriving in Rio de Janeiro, via Junior.

In addition to Porto Alegre, other potential routes for new V.tal cables include Recife, where there are also branching units, and the South Pacific coast, from Barranquilla down to Peru and Chile. 

In Chile, where there are large hyperscale datacenter projects in operation and under development, the coastal city of Valparaíso has a structured landing station and is turning into a new hub for submarine cables in South America.

It is from Valparaíso that Google's Curie cable departs to California, and, in the near future, cables to Antarctica and the Asia-Pacific (the Humboldt project).

Also anchored in Valparaíso are the Prat, South America-1 and South America Crossing systems and, more recently, the South Pacific Cable System (SPCS)/Mistral.

Valparaíso also has good terrestrial fiber infrastructure connected to Santiago and then across the Andes to Argentina, with Uruguay and Porto Alegre being potential future destinations.

INFOVIA 04

In related news, Brazil's EAF just concluded the deployment of the sub-fluvial fiber cable for Infovia 04, which is part of the Norte Conectado program.

The cable connects the states of Amazonas and Roraima through four locations: Vila de Moura in Amazonas, and Santa Maria do Boiaçu, Caracaraí and Boa Vista in Roraima.