Huawei Marine and CTR partner to connect southern Chile via Fiber Optic Austral submarine cable

Huawei Marine and CTR partner to connect southern Chile via Fiber Optic Austral submarine cable

Huawei Marine said that it will partner with CTR (Comunicación y Telefonía Rural S.A.) to deploy the 2,800 km Fiber Optic Austral (FOA) submarine cable, connecting three regions in southern Chile. Touted as enabling the world's southernmost submarine cable, the deployment willenhance connectivity for businesses, residents, and regional governments and will improve agriculture, education, healthcare, and the tourism industry, says Huawei Marine. The deployment will also drive e-commerce efforts in Chile.

With the highest Internet concentration in South America, Chile's national backbone network encompasses much of the country. Complex topography south of Puerto Montt makes it challenging to establish quality network infrastructure in that region, however. Delivering a design capacity of 16 Tbps, the FOA undersea cable system will meet increasing connectivity demand in the Las Lagos, Aysén, and Magallanes regions. The vice ministry of telecommunication and transportation ministry of Chile, Subtel, will fund the FOA submarine system.

Survey work for the FOA began earlier this month (see "EGS begins survey for FOA submarine cable in Patagonia"). According to Huawei Marine, it will deliver the end-to-end submarine cable system, while CTR will deploy and operate the network. Huawei Marine's upgraded 100G universal platform will provide an optical network architecture between submarine and terrestrial networks. The company expects the FOA cable system to be completed by the end of 2019.

"The work of gathering technical information through the marine survey and its use for the development of detailed engineering by Huawei Marine for the southern submarine trunk, is of high technological standard and detail, which makes it suitable for the complicated circumstances and challenges that the area represents for its deployment," said Patricio Morales, CTR CEO. "The systems of optical transmission of capacities of up to 100 Gbps per channel will provide high capacity to the area, which can be interconnected in a simple way to the networks of existing operators, to improve their services with superior quality in terms of bandwidth and delay, in addition to more convenient prices, which will guarantee an adequate return on the capital expenditures made."

For related articles, visit the Network Design Topic Center.

For more information on high-speed transmission systems and suppliers, visit the Lightwave Buyer's Guide.