From Fox News Latino

Divers and technicians on Saturday completed the deployment of the most advanced undersea fiber-optic cable in the Caribbean and Central America, bringing ashore the final section and laying it in a trench dug in the sand at one of Puerto Rico’s most popular tourist beaches.

“It’s been a long process that has involved large-scale investment and the coordinated work of many companies, and whose technical aspect has concluded today with the deployment of the cable,” Wanda Rivero, manager of the Telefonica Cable Station in San Juan, told Efe on Isla Verde beach.

Rivero and her team supervised from early Saturday the arrival of the final section of the 6,000-kilometer (3,728-mile), 80-terabyte-per-second cable, which was brought onto Isla Verde by a team of divers to the surprise of local residents and tourists enjoying a morning at the beach.

Saturday’s operation marks the completion of the cable link connecting the United States with the Virgin Islands, Aruba, Puerto Rico, Curacao, Colombia, Panama and Ecuador, a massive project that has also involved the participation of other large regional companies: Cable & Wireless, Telconet, Setar and UTS.

A three-meter-deep (9.8-foot-deep) trench needed to be dug in the sand to complete the connection of the Pacific Caribbean Cable System to a nearby cable landing station operated by Spanish telecommunications giant Telefonica.

“This new cable will allow Telefonica – as well as the other consortium participants – to offer their customers more guarantees with respect to their telecom connections,” Silvio Navarrete, Telefonica’s wholesale sales director for Puerto Rico and the Caribbean, told Efe on Isla Verde.

Telefonica, a leading global telecommunications company with a presence in more than 40 countries, offers service to nearly all the large Internet providers on the Caribbean island, ensuring Web connectivity for end users.

“Our 10 data centers located in nine countries are connected to our robust international network with more than 650 points of presence,” Carolina Valeriano, the country manager of Telefonica Puerto Rico, said.

“This infrastructure is supported by a whole network of undersea cables, which are a key piece in offering customers, both businesses and individuals, increasingly higher-capacity services,” she told Efe.

In fact, the cable will allow Telefonica to resell (or rent) transmission capacity to other telecommunications companies in Puerto Rico, a U.S. commonwealth; other countries and territories of the Caribbean; and a portion of the Pacific coast of the Americas, so they in turn can offer that capacity to their customers.

“Now it’s a question of completing the relevant technical tests, and around mid-year the cable could begin commercial operations,” Navarrete said.

The cable, which is expected to begin operating in June, was manufactured in France, where global telecommunications equipment company Alcatel-Lucent loaded it onto a vessel comparable in size to a large cruise ship and brought it to the Americas.

Since its arrival, the ship has had to cross the Panama Canal on several occasions.

Although the cable is buried under the sand near the coast and at sea depths of less than 1,000 meters (3,280 feet), it simply rests on the sea floor further out in the ocean.

“This cable will allow us to diversify our points of access to the United States and Puerto Rico and also expand connectivity with Colombia, Ecuador and Panama,” Valeriano said.

Meanwhile, in Puerto Rico, “Telefonica not only can ensure Puerto Ricans’ connectivity in the coming years, offering the most robust solution for the (U.S. commonwealth), but also will provide the capacity needed to facilitate high bandwidth usage stemming from, for example, video downloads,” she added.

“This will allow us to offer better service to our customers in terms of Internet capacity, security and diversity,” Valeriano said.

EFE

For more on this story go to: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2015/05/23/final-section-modern-regional-undersea-cable-comes-ashore-in-puerto-rico/

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