The new landing station enhances Colombia’s high capacity connectivity and options for redundancy. Level 3 states it will also remove sole reliance on traditional connectivity via the Caribbean Coast. The fibre optic undersea cable runs 300km to the seaport city of Buenaventura on Colombia’s Pacific coast, then 154km over land to the city of Cali, where it connects with Level 3’s national fibre optic system that provides access to the main Colombian markets.
Demand for connectivity and network services in Colombia and Latin America is rising. Frost & Sullivan estimates the Latin American fixed broadband services market will grow at a rate of 12.4%, to reach 90.8 million connections in 2018. At launch, Level 3´s undersea system has a total installed capacity of eight terabits of which 400-gigabits are already available. Level 3 says that enterprises will have greater access to connectivity, route diversity and redundancy both domestically and internationally.
“This expanded undersea cable system connection represents Level 3’s commitment to meeting the increasing demand for network services in Latin America,” said Hector Alonso, Level 3's regional president of Latin America.
“As part of Level 3’s South American Crossing (SAC) system, the cable connects the six major economies in Latin America providing customers a secure, reliable and redundant way to access our global footprint.”
Colombia will be able to transmit data and mobile communications more quickly to many key cities throughout the Americas, such as Los Angeles, Miami and New York, US; Mexico City, Mexico; Santiago, Chile; Buenos Aires, Argentina and São Paulo, Brazil. In turn, these cities will have greater connectivity to seven of the main cities in Colombia: Bogotá, Medellin, Cali, Ibague, Manizales, Pereira, Armenia and Popayan. The new route also provides enhanced connectivity and route diversity to cities in Asia and Europe.
Level 3 owns more than 180,000km (110,000 miles) of intercity routes, 103,000km (64,000 miles) of metro routes and 53,000km (33,000 miles) of undersea routes.
