Inaugurated during a live virtual event, Eduardo Falzoni described the launch of the subsea cable system as a “major milestone in the digital transformation of Latin America”
The project was started in 2018 and is now the first new route to provide direct connectivity from Argentina to Brazil, since 2001 and more than doubles the capacity that is currently availability.
By 2020, the project had completed the deployment of its two landing stations in Praia Grande, Brazil and Las Toninas, Argentina.
As of this year, the company confirmed that customers from Argentina, Colombia, and the US had been activated on the Malbec system, which interconnects GlobeNet's existing points of presence in Miami and New York directly to the new points of presence in Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires.
According to Falzoni, there are four pillars that underline the design of the system, these are firstly is the larger capacity, which is built to support ‘high traffic applications’ such as streaming, live sports cloud and gaming. The system has been designed to deliver 100G and 400G of capacity across the entire route.
Diversity is the next pillar with Malbec featuring a new route to previous systems and newly built landing stations “to satisfy the need for multiple access to PoPs and data centres”. Next is resiliency which was achieved through “interconnections with other systems on the subsea routes and via diverse backhaul routes”.
The last pillar was low latency “thanks to the optimal cable route, the latest advancements in optical and electronic transmission, customers in Argentina will enjoy high-speeds and capacity access with minimum latency”, added Falzoni. The estimated latency on the Malbec system is 26.7 milliseconds between San Paolo and Buenos Aires.
Joining Falzoni during the virtual launch was Diana Perez, North America Sales Director at GlobeNet who added that the system has been futureproofed to added landing points with a “stubbed branch in Porto Alegre, in South Brazil”.
“In addition, other complimentary services such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), virtual router and a widely popular remote peering solution, GNIX, allows customers to reach remote interconnection points from Fortaleza, Rio de Janeiro and now Buenos Aires,” said Perez.
She also credited the terrestrial backhauls and the integration of larger interconnecting subsea systems as ways in which the system will “contribute significantly to Argentina's economy and its technological growth”.
On the technology side, Philippe Perrier, CTO at GlobeNet, said that, “supplied by Alcatel Submarine Networks … the trunk cable between Rio de Janeiro, and Las Toninas consists of six fibre pairs, and the branch to Pria Grande is made up of eight fibre pairs. The system was designed for minimum total capacity of 108Tbps between Rio de Janeiro and Las Toninas.”
According to Perrier the system also benefits from a “two wing submarine cable system architecture” resulting in added resiliency.
Designed as system that has decoupled the wetland from the transmission equipment, Perrier says that the network has flexibility to select the submarine line terminal equipment from “any suitable suppliers”, the system also features spatial division multiplexing (SDM) technology “that maximizes the capacity of the entire cable, rather than the capacity per fibre pair.”
