The submarine cable industry is famous for its peaks and valleys and nowhere is that seen more clearly than in the deployment of submarine fiber systems in Latin America and the Caribbean. Since the beginning of the fiber era, there has been three clear “boom” periods in submarine cable building in this region, each coinciding with the introduction of new transmission technologies. In between are the “droughts,” where the few systems that are installed tend to be small in scope – domestic networks or short links between islands. We have just left a boom period in Latin America and the Caribbean and are facing one of these droughts in 2002. The first boom in fiber optic submarine systems in Latin America and the Caribbean came in 1990. In this year the first large-scale fiber system for the Caribbean entered ser vice – TransCaribbean System-1 (TCS-1). This 4,500kilometer cable linked Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and Colombia. In that same year, two other key systems – Florico-2 and CARAC linked the Caribbean to the US and to transatlantic cable systems, thus improving access to the
The State of the Industry
THE AMERICAS global network. These systems used 140Mbps technology – the standard of the day. The next boom period began in 1994. This included the introduction of 560-Mbps systems as well as the newer Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) technology. Americas-1 and Columbus-2 were the most significant of these systems. Americas-1 provided a north-south system linking Florida, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Trinidad, Venezuela and Brazil. Columbus-2 was the first transatlantic fiber system to take a
“southern” route directly from Mexico, Florida and the U.S. Virgin Islands to Spain, Portugal and Italy. The following year saw other major systems enter service, including Unisur (Brazil-Argentina-Uruguay) and the Eastern 27
Caribbean Fibre System (ECFS). The ECFS was an interesting system in many respects. Built by a consortium led by Cable & Wireless and other carriers serving the small islands of the eastern Caribbean, the ECFS replaced a microwave system that had been the only link between the islands. A series of devastating storms in that hurricaneprone region demonstrated the vulnerability of microwave towers, leading to interest in submarine cables. Ironically, one of the C&W cable ships installing the ECFS had to deal with another kind of natural disaster – it participated in rescue efforts when the volcano on Montserrat erupted. The last boom period began in the late 1990s and ended in 2001. This period saw an unprecedented wave of construction as