The New Synapse Cable: Brazil To Tuckerton, New Jersey

A couple years ago BTG Pactual Infrastructure Fund II purchased the subsea operator, GlobeNet, as well as a South American fibre optics backbone company, OI, and combined those assets with a couple of data centers. Globenet's main asset, its cable linking New Jersey to Sao Paulo, is near end of life. But its cable landing stations face no such expiration date. Moreover, the Fortaleza CLS is a well known peering point with a lot of customers. BTG put all the telecom assets in a telecom infrastructure subsidiary known as V.TAL.

At PTC in Hawaii V.TAL announced its plan for a 16 fibre pair, 320 Tbps subsea cable that will link the Sao Paulo Equinix data centers to Secaucus Equinix and probably also the NASDAQ and NYSE data centers in Carteret and Mahwah, New Jersey. The Globenet assets will accelerate the project because Synapse will use its cable landing stations in Tuckerton and Fortaleza as well as some of the existing US back haul fibre. The OI backbone, purchased for a billion dollars, has an extensive Brazilian footprint. Undoubtedly, Synapse and OI's terrestrrial network will be integrated to the benefit of both. So Synapse will effectively provide end-to-end connectivity between most Brazilian data centers on the coast and the US. Services will include 100G, 400G, and 800G waves. 

V.TAL is also developing new data centers in Brazil. Indeed, the master plan appears to integrate the data centers, Synapse, and the huge Brazilian OI footprint into a single network with significant synergies. The data centers will feed traffic into the subsea cable and the subsea cables makes V.TAL's data centers much more interesting to potential customers. This is a common trend. Uniterreno in Italy is also building a subsea cable linking different Italian regions. That cable is being extended into new, Uniterreno owned or affiliated data centers. Another example is Quadrivium. Although it is not deploying a subsea cable, its Genoa data center project includes a remarkable amount of subsea cable infrastructure including a bore pipe, beach manhole, front haul fibre, and colo space for SLTEs. Subsea cables are definitely welcomed at that facility.

I welcome the Synapse project because the hyperscalers and Telxius dominate the region. As a bandwidth guy, I always welcome new wholesale players to the party. It is worth noting that the Synapse cable uses the open cable business model. So V.TAL will unboubtedly sell spectrum and fibre pairs to wholesale carriers interested in securing capacity. I would not be surprised if Synapse offers low latency services like Seaborn and Avelacom.

To some extent this integrated network approach might be a reaction to hyperscaler dominance, which has made building private cables rather risky. Data centers are hungry beasts for WAN bandwidth. Hence tying cables into data centers sharply reduces the investment risk. Given the Aqua Comms Debacle as well as Hyperscaler Hegemony, investors do need comforting.

Map Of The New Fibre Optic Subsea Synapse Cable

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