Liberty Networks, Gold Data bring Sparkle to construction of LatAm cable

Liberty Latin America’s Liberty Networks and Gold Data brought in an extra partner for the development of their joint submarine fiber system connecting the US with Mexico and other parts of Latin America.

Telecom Italia’s Sparkle, a specialist in the submarine cable segment, joined them on both the construction and commercialization of the system, now branded MANTA.

The MANTA project came about from a combination of Liberty Networks and Gold Data’s respective submarine projects GD-1 and LN-1. 

Sparkle will now join Liberty and Gold Data on the northern portion of MANTA, connecting the US to Mexico, and will join Liberty Networks on the cable’s southern portion, accessing Panama and Colombia.

A cable project in the Caribbean was expected for Sparkle.

“We already have a new cable in the Atlantic, Seabras-1. In the Pacific we have Curie. The Caribbean part is missing. There are several projects for that region. We believe that, if we can close a partnership with any of these projects, we can make them viable. 

We’re negotiating, looking at which projects are most interesting for our traffic profile and our business model, and will probably announce some partnership soon,” Mauricio Traverso, Sparkle's VP for the Americas, told BNamericas in a March interview.

MANTA

MANTA is being touted as the first international submarine cable in the Gulf of Mexico, connecting Mexico and the US with Central and Latin America. 

The system is intended to improve traffic flow in the region by providing new low-latency routes to interconnect major data hubs in Mexico City, Queretaro, Bogota and Panama City with the US, according to the companies.

Its northern stretch will run from Apalachee Beach and North Miami in the US to Veracruz and Cancún in Mexico.

The southern part will connect Panama City and Colombia’s to GD-1's Cancún section. Potential extensions on this section include the Cayman Islands, as Liberty's SVP of infrastructure and corporate strategy, Ray Collins, previously told BNamericas.  

MANTA is estimated to be 5,600km long when fully completed and is designed to support a minimum of 20Tb in transmission capacity per fiber pair. 

The system is expected to be in operation by 2027. Initially, the expectation was that it could go live in 2026. 

The companies said that they plan to announce their technology provider soon.

Liberty Networks, a wholesale data infrastructure division of Liberty Latin America, connects approximately 40 countries and territories with nearly 50,000km of submarine fiber plus 17,000km of terrestrial networks. 

Panama, Costa Rica and Mexico are the three countries where Liberty Latin America is seeing most opportunities when it comes to the datacenter ecosystem, CEO Balan Nair told investors in August.

Headquartered in the US, Gold Data has regional offices in Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Panama, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela.

It interconnects more than 156 points of presence (PoPs) and 76 datacenters, with reported presence in 35 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Sparkle, for its part, manages a network of more than 600,000km of fiber spanning from Europe to Africa and the Middle East, the Americas and Asia. The company is currently in the process of being acquired by the Italian government.