Huawei Marine Partners with CTR to Deploy a New Undersea Cable System

Huawei Marine will partner with CTR (Comunicación y Telefonía Rural S.A.) to deploy the fiber optic austral (FOA), the southernmost submarine cable in the world, to connect three regions in southern Chile. This project is dedicated to improving the connectivity of residents, businesses, and regional governments, to improve education, healthcare, agriculture, and the tourism industry and stimulate e-commerce initiatives in Chile. Chile has the highest internet penetration in South America. While its national backbone network covers much of the country, complex topography south of Puerto Montt leaves that region short on well-established network infrastructure, and unable to meet ever-increasing connectivity demand of surrounding areas.

Subtel, as a Vice Ministry of Telecommunication and Transportation Ministry of Chile, will invest in the new FOA to connect the Las Lagos, Aysén, and Magallanes regions. CTR was awarded the contract to deploy and operate the network, while Huawei Marine will provide the end-to-end submarine cable solution. Huawei Marine’s advanced 100G universal platform is utilized to provide a seamless optical network architecture between submarine and terrestrial networks. The system has a design capacity of 16 Tb/s and a length of 2800 km. It is expected to be completed by the end of 2019.

Patricio Morales, CEO of CTR has indicated that the work of gathering technical information through the Marine Survey and its use for the development of detailed engineering by Huawei Marine for the Southern Submarine Trunk, is of high technological standard and detail, which makes it suitable for the complicated circumstances and challenges that the area represents for its deployment. The systems of optical transmission of capacities of upto 100 Gbps per channel, will provide high capacity to the area, which can be interconnected in a simple way to the networks of existing operators, to improve their services with superior quality in terms of bandwidth and delay, in addition to more convenient prices, which will guarantee an adequate return on the capital expenditures made.