Equinix, Inc. (NASDAQ: EQIX), the world’s largest provider of data centers and interconnected solutions, recently announced its selection as the provider of U.S. facilities and services for the Monet Submarine Cable System landing station.
Monet is a sub-sea fiber optic cable connecting the U.S. with Brazil with a planned capacity in excess of 60 terabits. The cable consortium is jointly owned by Algar Telecom (a Brazilian telecom company and ISP), Angola Cables (an Angolan telecom company operating in the wholesale market), Antel (the Uruguayan telecom company) and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), known collectively as the Monet Investors.
Work on Monet has begun and is expected to be completed in 2017. Equinix’s MI3 International Business Exchange (IBX®) data center, which services the greater Miami metropolitan area, will be the U.S. terminal for the system. The cable will run for 6,560 miles, linking Boca Raton, Florida, to the Brazilian cities of Praia Grande, in São Paulo state, and Fortaleza, capital of the northeastern state of Ceará.
Google has landing party responsibilities at both ends. It is the U.S. landing party and will provide landing facilities in Praia Grande, Brazil. This venture allows Google, consequently, to gain basic physical access to an internet link between the U.S. and South America. Angola Cables will be responsible for the landing facilities in Fortaleza.
This is not Google’s first submarine cable joint venture. In 2008, it was involved in the Unity consortium that constructed a trans-Pacific sub-sea fiber optic cable linking Japan and the U.S.
Sub-sea fiber optic links are thought to offer a number of advantages over satellite links. It is more difficult to eavesdrop on a submarine communication and easier to maintain and repair a cable on the seabed than a satellite orbiting the planet 20,000 miles away. Monet will feature the latest high-quality 6-fiber-pair cable and optical transmission technologies, with an initial design capacity of about 60Tb/s (100Gb/s x 100 wavelengths x 6 fiber-pairs).
As more U.S. businesses turn their attention to Latin America and Brazil, which is the world’s eighth largest economy and Latin America’s largest, the demand for high-bandwidth connectivity has increased. U.S. firms are finding they require more capacity to run IT operations, including cloud-based applications. By connecting to Equinix data centers, Monet users will benefit from Equinix’s mature business ecosystems and its interconnection platform – Platform Equinix™ – which connects more than 8,000 global businesses in 40 markets around the globe.
At the same time, supply constraints are arising as legacy cables near the end of their life cycles. Thus, it is very likely there will be a rise in sub-sea cable deployments. Monet will be the fifth submarine cable link between Brazil and the U.S.
According to industry research firm TeleGeography’s Global Bandwidth Research Service, over a billion dollars will be spent in construction costs of sub-sea cables to Latin America and the Caribbean from 2015-2016, the second highest region globally. Currently, more than 99 percent of global data traffic is carried through submarine fiber cables, with less than one percent of the remaining traffic carried through satellite systems. This increased connectivity is expected to provide an ultra-low latency path for Equinix and Monet customers deployed between Miami and São Paulo.
Two factors are driving the demand for increased bandwidth. The use of multiple devices, channels and formats has increased. Millennials, particularly, may connect to the internet from a desktop, tablet or mobile phone. They will employ email, social media, instant messaging, text and others services to communicate and share content in a variety of formats, such as text, images and video.
Businesses are also employing IT to increase revenues. More than half of U.S. firms believe that establishing direct and secure interconnections with their employees, partners and customers is “very important” to their ability to compete and are increasingly turning to links like Monet that connect to colocation data centers such as those operated by Equinix.
For more information, please visit www.Equinix.com
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