MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Google sets eyes on Las Toninas for transoceanic internet cable

The cable is to be named after Brazilian novelist Maria Firmina dos Reis (1825-1917)

Argentina's National Communications Agency (Enacom) has authorized Google Infraestructura Argentina SRL to install a fiber optic system called Firmina through Argentine Sea waters, which “will be the longest in the world” providing internet connectivity.

US information technology giant Google has announced it would be bringing a 13,500-kilometer long cable connecting the Buenos Aires seaside resort of Las Toninas with Myrtle Beach (USA), through Punta del Este in Uruguay and Praia Grande in Brazil.

Las Toninas has been reported to be most suitable for this type of technological development. In addition to cables from other companies already reaching the same area, Google wants its own. By 2018 five cables were operational in Las Toninas: Unisur, Sam-1, SAC, Atlantis, and Bicentenario. At the end of 2021, GlobeNet and Meta's Malbec was added.

Cables through the Atlantic Ocean are attached to the so-called mooring ports along the seashore. In Las Toninas there are windowless semi-secret buildings for this purpose. It is Kilometer 0 of the internet in Argentina.

Enacom greenlighted the project called “Installation of the Firmina fiber optic cable system” in the Argentine territorial sea, ”with a route of approximately 13,500 km, which offers a final design capacity of 15.03 terabit per second (TB/s) per fiber pair,” according to a statement.

The agency also explained that Firmina will be able to operate with one power source at one end of the cable, in case some of its other sources should partially fail.

The cable is to be named after Maria Firmina dos Reis (1825-1917), a Brazilian author and abolitionist whose 1859 novel Úrsula describes the lives of Afro-Brazilians under slavery. The name was chosen to highlight the work and pioneering spirit of the woman considered to be Brazil's first novelist.

With 12 pairs of fiber, the cable will carry traffic between North and South America, providing fast, low-latency access to Google products such as search, Gmail, and YouTube, as well as Google Cloud services, it was announced.