ENCOM Authorizes Google's Firmina Cable
ENCOM Press Release
August 10, 2022
ENCOM Press ReleaseDuring its 80th monthly meeting, the Board of Directors of the National Communications Entity (ENACOM) authorized the company Google Infraestructura Argentina SRL to install the Firmina fiber optic cable system in the Argentine territorial sea, which will provide quality improvement in Internet connectivity .
The meeting of the ENACOM Board of Directors, headed by its president, Claudio Ambrosini, was attended by its full members: the vice president, Gustavo López; the directors appointed by the National Executive Branch, Gonzalo Quilodrán and María Florencia Pacheco; the directors proposed by the Bicameral Commission for the Promotion and Monitoring of Audiovisual Communication, Telecommunications Technologies and Digitization, Alejandro Gigena (virtually), Silvana Giudici and José Manuel Corral; the head of the Cabinet of the Entity, Ariel Martínez; the Agency's Technical Affairs Coordinator, Diego Leiva; and the Recording Secretary, María José Vázquez.
There, ENACOM authorized the permit to the international company to carry out the project called “Installation of the Firmina fiber optic cable system” in the Argentine territorial sea, with a trace of approximately 13,500 km, which offers a final design capacity of 15.03 terabit per second (TB/s) per fiber.
Firmina will be able to run on a single power source at one end of the cable, in case its other power sources are temporarily unavailable. With 12 fiber pairs, the cable will carry traffic quickly and securely between North and South America, providing fast, low-latency access to Google products like search, Gmail, and YouTube, as well as as well as Google Cloud services.
The project is designed to be a high-capacity fiber optic submarine cable system from the city of Myrtle Beach (South Carolina, United States of America) to the town of Las Toninas (Buenos Aires, Argentine Republic), with derivation in the city of Punta del Este (Eastern Republic of Uruguay) and another in the city of Praia Grande (São Paulo, Federative Republic of Brazil).
The installation and commissioning of this fiber optic submarine cable system will allow growth not only in technological terms, but also from an economic point of view, since the improvement of international connectivity is considered fundamental for any industry, whatever it may be. the sector in which it works, due to the transversality that telecommunications and information technologies have.
The cable is named after Maria Firmina dos Reis (1825-1917), a Brazilian author and abolitionist whose 1859 novel “Ursula” described the lives of Afro-Brazilians under slavery. With this cable, it is sought, in this sense, to highlight the work and pioneering spirit of who is considered the first novelist in Brazil.
ENACOM accompanies the promotion and progress of projects that expand borders to the world, specify actions that improve the quality of life of users throughout the region and guarantee access to new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) .
