By Mar Gonzalo From Fox News Latino

Spain’s Telefonica will put the finishing touches next week in Puerto Rico on the longest and most powerful submarine cable link in the Caribbean, a project that will provide a fiber-optic connection between the United States – the nerve center of the global Internet system – and Ecuador, Colombia and Panama, among other destinations.

“The great Internet ‘hubs’ are in the United States, and Puerto Rico only has four ‘links’ with them,” Guillermo Cañete, technological planning and transmission manager for the Madrid-based telecommunications giant, told Efe Saturday.

“Offering this new cable means opening a new ‘route’ with more frequencies than any other; it means greatly expanding connectivity guarantees,” both in the immediate present and in the future, “when much more transmission capacity than we can currently imagine may be required.”

“Ultimately, it means more options, more competition, better quality and lower prices,” the executive, whose company provides service to nearly all of the U.S. commonwealth’s large Internet providers, as well as those in much of the rest of Latin America, told Efe.

The cable, which has a carrying capacity of 80 terabytes per second and originates in Florida, is expected to arrive at the Puerto Rican tourist beach of Isla Verde late next week, although the precise date depends on maritime and climatic conditions.

“This is not just any cable. It’s one of the longest ever laid in the Caribbean, because at a length of some 6,000 kilometers (3,728 miles) it will continue on to Ecuador via Aruba, Colombia and Panama,” the project chief said.

Five large regional companies partnered on the massive project that involved “laying a cable the width of a finger across the entire Caribbean and a portion of the Pacific coast of the Americas,” Cañete said.

In that regard, besides connecting Puerto Rico with the United States, the cable – known as the PCCS (Pacific Caribbean Cable System) – will make the island a key link in bringing enormous Internet capacity to parts of Central America and Latin America’s Pacific coast.

“When we upload a photo to Facebook, search for something on Google or watch a video on YouTube, whether from Puerto Rico or Colombia, we connect with the United States,” the expert said.

Although relying on four cables for that “connection with the outside world” may seem sufficient, they are not that many considering Puerto Rico is located in an area of seismic activity.

Those concerns, among other reasons, were the genesis of the project, whose planning phase began in 2012 and which is to be completed next week since the rest of the cable has already been laid along the entire route and connected to different cable termination stations.

French global telecommunications equipment company Alcatel-Lucent manufactured the cable in that European country and transported it to the Americas in a vessel comparable in size to a large cruise ship. 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.

The ship will arrive off Puerto Rico’s coast at the end of next week, and the cable will then be extended with the help of divers to the beach, where a three-meter (10-foot) ditch will be dug to bring the cable to Telefonica’s installations nearby.

“Anchors and trawl nets are the main enemy of submarine cables,” said the expert, who describes with striking simplicity a world that for the vast majority of people is a complete mystery. EFE

For more on this story go to: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2015/04/18/caribbean-most-ambitious-submarine-fiber-optic-link-nearly-complete/

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