Seabras-1 Ready to Roll as Seaborn Completes Funding, Sparkle Signs On

The new independent submarine cable between North and South America known as Seabras-1 seems to finally have all its financial ducks in a row.  Yesterday, Seaborn Networks announced the project has now been fully funded, and this morning in a clearly related announcement we learned that TI Sparkle has signed on in a big way.

Seabras-1 will connect the markets of New York City and Sao Paolo directly, landing in Wall Township in New Jersey and Praia Grande, Brazil with six fiber pairs and a total initial theoretical capacity of 72Tbps.  The buildout also includes branching units for future expansion to Halifax, Ashburn, Miami, St. Croix, Fortaleza, Rio de Janeiro, and Los Toninas.  Now that financing is complete, manufacturing has commenced.  Alcatel-Lucent will be doing the heavy lifting, with a target date sometime in 2017.

The last piece of the funding puzzle seems to have come from TI Sparkle, which today revealed a $300M long term investment in the system.  That will give them three full fiber pairs on Seabras-1, branching rights at Fortaleza, and protected backhaul between New York and Miami.  The new route will clearly become one of the key legs of the company’s global network infrastructure, as one doesn’t invest a sum of this size in anything else.

 

 

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Categories: Internet Backbones · Telecom Equipment · Undersea cables