 | Issue: | Latin America 2014 |
| Article no.: | 8 | |
| Topic: | Enhancing connectivity in Latin America | |
| Author: | Erick Contag | |
| Title: | COO | |
| Organisation: | GlobeNet | |
| PDF size: | 231KB |
About author
Erick Contag is the Chief Operating Officer for GlobeNet. Mr. Contag brings more than twenty years of sales, marketing, business development, strategy and corporate management expertise to GlobeNet. His responsibilities include strategic management of the company’s business operations and expansion into new regions.
Mr. Contag has held executive positions in the U.S. and Latin America including founder, President and CEO of DataViz, a leading systems integration firm, CSO/CTO of Simbacom, a wireless service provider, and VP of Engineering for Protokol Sistemas, a leading network Integration firm. He also has served on the Board of Directors of several companies and organizations. In 2011, Mr. Contag was awarded the Global Telecoms Business Power 100 Award, an honor bestowed upon the most powerful 100 executives in the telecom industry.
Mr. Contag holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tulsa, U.S. and an Executive Engineering Management certification from Instituto de Estudio de Superiores de Administración (IESA).
Article abstract
Deploying subsea cables is expensive, complex and takes time. In today’s challenging economic and political climates, the complexities in dealing with country to country routes and securing governmental permits make the stakes higher than ever – and can potentially delay even the most well-planned and well-funded cable builds.
Specifically, Latin America’s bandwidth demand has risen with over 394 million Internet users expected by 2017, and further penetration and growth is expected in the years to come.
Full Article
Technology has come a long way since 1850 when the very first subsea telecoms cable was deployed. That 20-mile cable connected England to France via the English Channel and eventually led to today’s environment with billions of dollars invested in telecommunications infrastructure connecting continents across the World’s oceans. Copper and gutta percha as an insulating material were the main elements used back then for telegraphy services; having limited capacity and reliability, whereas today the advancements in fibre optics, along with high performance equipment and high capacity infrastructure enable secure and highly reliable global communications.
While technology has clearly evolved to allow subsea fibre optic cable deployments across the globe supporting terabits of capacity, many challenges and complexities in deploying, maintaining, and operating such infrastructure still exist. For cable operators and investors, a high stakes race exists to reach underserved areas such as the Middle East and Africa, as well as improve upon capacity in high-growth areas such as Latin America.
As the demand for broadband service surges, cable operators and telecom carriers are seeing huge upticks in the amount of data traffic across their networks. Its been reported that mobile data traffic is projected to grow 30-fold over the next few years and 100-fold over the next ten years . Across the globe, users are relying on mobile broadband to reach the Internet in order to access streaming video, interactive content, gaming, social media, multi-media applications and messaging. Prices have also dropped, which in turn spurred quicker adoption of smartphones and other data-centric devices.
But behind the ease of use of mobile and broadband access to the Internet; behind the ability to share pictures and message, as well as to share complex corporate data or access time-sensitive financial and stock market data, lies a complex web of critical telecommunications and technology infrastructure. The underlying infrastructure includes wireless and terrestrial networks, data centers, and fibre optic submarine cable systems, amongst other operations, management, and support systems. As end users we don’t only expect anything but the best end-user experience; we depend on communications services for our day-to-day lives.
In order to service these ever demanding end-users and the exponential thirst for everything Internet, carriers and content providers are not only expanding their terrestrial infrastructure, but also increasingly depend on secure, high capacity International routes; and it all starts with submarine cable systems.
Deploying subsea cables is expensive, complex and takes time. In today’s challenging economic and political climates, the complexities in dealing with country to country routes and securing governmental permits make the stakes higher than ever – and can potentially delay even the most well-planned and well-funded cable builds.
Specifically, Latin America’s bandwidth demand has risen with over 394 million Internet users expected by 2017 , and further penetration and growth is expected in the years to come. Latin America is home to the fastest growing population of Internet users, which has spurred operators to invest billions of dollars to keep up with increasing bandwidth demand, 4G LTE Services, and building new subsea cables as well as upgrading existing ones. Yet despite this continued growth, the Internet penetration of many of the individual countries within Latin America is still relatively low and falls around the world average of 35%. The market will not reach a state of maturity for years to come and until populations across the entire region have stable and secure broadband access. The process of extending and enhancing connectivity across the region begins at the infrastructure level.
Taking a closer look at a real-world submarine project, we can look to a new cable extension that navigated through the many complexities and successfully launched a new subsea
express route at the end of 2013. The new LATAM route connects a cable landing station located in Barranquilla on Colombia’s Atlantic coast to an existing subsea cable system. As the lowest latency route from Colombia to Brazil, the new cable encompassed the latest in optical submarine technology, which allows for quick and seamless upgrades in the future. The cable system provides open access to terrestrial providers in Colombia.
Figure 1. Shows a new extension of a subsea network reaching Barranquilla, Colombia
Carriers have also been steadily preparing for the continued increases in broadband demand by fortifying their own network architectures. To this point, an anchor tenant on a new Colombia cable system has deployed the first large-scale 4G/LTE network in Latin America. This level of high quality, low latency connectivity in the Latin America region and the explosion in global demand is paving the way for future advancements all across the southern hemisphere.
Carriers are benefiting from improved connectivity as they market consumer and business broadband across Latin America. Specifically, the benefits are due to the subsea cable connecting Colombia’s telecommunications industry directly with the main source of content in the USA and also with other South American markets such as Venezuela and Brazil. The direct connection with Brazil facilitated the broadcast of FIFA World Cup 2014 to the region and will facilitate the broadcast of future International sporting events to be held in South America like the Summer Olympic games to be hosted in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. This direct connection between Colombia and Brazil will also allow financial institutions and the Colombian Stock Exchange to connect with BOVESPA in Sao Paulo without having to go throughout the existing US routes.
In addition, the new route from Colombia to the US presents to carriers and service providers with an additional option to build their backbones with diverse – non-overlapping paths to the US.
Latin America is hungry for connectivity and is counting on cable operators and carriers to push the region forward, providing access to the high performance applications and services that they desire. In the effort to strive to keep up with the steady increase of Internet users and data traffic, subsea projects will continue to pave the way for faster, more resilient connectivity around the World. We will see the many benefits of advanced subsea architecture trickle down from subsea operators to carriers to regional service provides and over to everyday Internet users. The telecommunications industry will be keeping an eye on Latin America, because the race to connect the unconnected has just begun.
http://www.submarinecablesystems.com/default.asp.pg-History
http://www.submarinecablemap.com/#/submarine-cable/globenet
http://whitepapers.lightreading.com/pdf_whitepapers/approved/1361377925_HR_Samsung_LTE_Strategies_WP_2-19-13.pdf
